


still feel the pull of you

by napricot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blow Jobs, Captain America Sam Wilson, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, POV Sam Wilson, Past Riley/Sam Wilson, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Soul Bond, Soul Stone (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:15:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22934665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napricot/pseuds/napricot
Summary: "The frantic pulse of fear doesn’t ease until Sam catches sight of Barnes for the first time since the end of the battle: he’s dirty and disheveled, and still, somehow, impossibly, the best thing Sam’s ever seen. The gallop of Sam’s heart slows, and the tightness in his lungs eases so suddenly that it’s like he’s gone buoyant, ready to float away without the help of any wings. Barnes turns as if he can sense Sam looking at him, and when he meets Sam’s eyes, he smiles, and it’s the brightest damn thing on this battlefield, a shock of sweetness in the midst of so much dark bitterness and confusion. Sam smiles back, giddy with joy and relief.He thinks,thank God Bucky’s okay.Then he thinks,wait, what the fuck?"After realizing there are some unexpected side effects for those who've been brought back to life after the Snap, Sam and Bucky slowly but surely learn that if they want to be loved, they must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known [via soul bond].
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson
Comments: 172
Kudos: 603
Collections: CLOSE ENOUGH FEBRUARY 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The National's "The Pull of You." Summary paraphrased from Timothy Kreider. For the free space of my Close Enough bingo card: 5. Soulbonding.
> 
> This fic is complete, I'm just frantically doing edits. It will be posted in full by Saturday because lol that is the deadline! pray for me as I desperately attempt to reach bingo with one last fic after this one.
> 
> Re this not being Endgame compliant: I tire of finding new and creative ways to fix Endgame. Accept that in this fic a) Clint died on Vormir instead of Natasha and b) Steve didn't stay in the past.

Something is wrong.

Sam’s standing on the smoking and ravaged remains of a battlefield, Tony Stark is dead, five years have passed in the blink of an eye and Sam’s apparently just been resurrected, so a lot of things are wrong, really, but the urgent, panicky fear and worry making his heart pound so damn fast right now are too immediate for all of that. He does a self-check for injuries, but he’s all present and accounted for, no injuries worse than unremarkable strained muscles, bruises and scrapes. And yet, his body’s telling him: _something’s wrong something’s wrong something’s wrong_.

The frantic pulse of fear doesn’t ease until Sam catches sight of Barnes for the first time since the end of the battle: he’s dirty and disheveled, and still, somehow, impossibly, the best thing Sam’s ever seen. The gallop of Sam’s heart slows, and the tightness in his lungs eases so suddenly that it’s like he’s gone buoyant, ready to float away without the help of any wings. Barnes turns as if he can sense Sam looking at him, and when he meets Sam’s eyes, he smiles, and it’s the brightest damn thing on this battlefield, a shock of sweetness in the midst of so much dark bitterness and confusion. Sam smiles back, giddy with joy and relief.

He thinks, _thank God Bucky’s okay._

Then he thinks, _wait, what the fuck?_

* * *

Listen, Sam doesn’t _dislike_ Barnes, per se. It’d be a pretty asshole move to dislike the guy for things he had no real control over, like being a brainwashed assassin, being framed for a bombing, and becoming the subject of an international manhunt. Sam has processed his feelings of fear and resentment about all of that, and safely set them aside, mostly. But Sam can’t claim to know the guy all that well either, and he doesn’t think he’s out of line to be occasionally annoyed by Barnes and the ways he complicates Sam’s life. Sure, Sam genuinely appreciates that all the times they’ve been in a fight together, Barnes has unflinchingly and automatically had Sam’s back, has even thrown himself between Sam and danger, and yeah, Sam’s happy his recovery has been going well. But absolutely none of that explains the way Sam keeps feeling like he absolutely has to have Barnes in his eye line at all times right now.

Post-battle, they’ve all ended up at a motel that’s serving as a combination base of operations and barracks while they regroup. There’s been a lot of crying and hugging, and a wildly confusing and practically unbelievable debrief about half of the universe’s population turning to dust and five years of hell and some real hail Mary time travel adventures to fix it, and all throughout, Sam’s been finding himself at Barnes’ side without conscious thought, close enough to feel his warmth, close enough that their arms and knees keep brushing against each other, each glancing contact oddly steadying.

At first, Sam justifies it to himself as both of them being at loose ends in a disorienting and chaotic situation; they’ve both missed out on the last five years, and once the battlefield’s cleared of casualties, there’s not much either of them can contribute, or many people they recognize beyond the original Avengers, who are very busy dealing with the fallout of half of the world’s population suddenly reappearing. But when he and Barnes end up automatically heading for the same double room, no discussion involved, like they do this all the time, Sam has to admit that something’s up.

Barnes must realize it too, because the moment he follows Sam into the double room, Barnes frowns, confused, eyes darting between Sam and the two beds.

“Sorry, I—I should bunk with Steve, maybe,” says Barnes slowly. “I don’t know why I—”

“Sam, Bucky?” calls out Steve, a faint thread of panic in his voice. “Are you two—oh, there you are. Do you two mind doubling up with me and Nat? Me and Bucky can take one bed, and you and Nat can take the other.”

The motel’s not so tight on space that they need to sleep four to a room, but Sam sees the desperate tension around Steve’s eyes, the new lines of pain and unhappiness on his forehead and around his mouth. He’d gone five years thinking Sam and Bucky were gone for good. Sam’s not about to begrudge him some clinginess and a sleepover.

“Yeah, sure, I’m cool with that,” says Sam. “Figure we could all do with a sleepover, yeah? You two can catch us up on what we’ve missed.”

“Course it’s fine, Steve,” Barnes agrees, smiling, but Sam can still see the worry lingering around his eyes.

* * *

It’s a long, emotional night. Steve’s broken up about Stark’s death, and Natasha’s quietly a total wreck about Barton’s, and Sam and Barnes can’t do much about any of it but offer shoulders to cry on. With every new detail Steve and Natasha divulge about the last five years, the anxiety and horror settling in Sam’s stomach grow heavier and heavier. Coming back from the loss and return of half the planet’s population isn’t going to be easy. He wants to make things better for Steve and Nat, wants to lift the despair and exhaustion weighing them down and tell them everything is going to be okay now, but the five lost years separating them feel like a chasm none of them can bridge just yet.

Steve and Natasha eventually fall asleep, and unlike all the other times he and Natasha have shared a bed, Natasha isn’t maintaining a careful foot or two of personal space between them. She’s curled up close, not quite cuddling, but close enough that they can feel each other’s warmth, close enough that her face is tucked in against Sam’s chest. When he looks over at Steve and Bucky’s bed, he sees that Steve has gone full octopus, big spooning Barnes with aggressiveness. Or maybe desperation, judging by the way Steve’s hand is clenched tightly in the fabric of Barnes’ shirt. In the dark of the motel room, Sam can’t make out Barnes’ expression, and it occurs to him that Barnes might not be alright with all that physical contact, or with being rendered physically immobile, even if it is in a harmless, cuddling kind of way.

“You cool with being Steve’s own personal Bucky Bear over there, Barnes?” Sam whispers, knowing Barnes’ enhanced hearing will pick it up even from across the room.

There’s no answer from Barnes for a few seconds, long enough that Sam starts to wonder ifhe’s asleep, before he whispers, “Please don’t tell me they still make Bucky Bears,” and Sam grins into the darkness.

“I don’t know about now, but they absolutely still made them when I was a kid.”

Sam hears Barnes huff out an exasperated breath, and though Sam can’t see him, he knows he’s got one of his amused half-smiles on his face. Which, okay, Sam’s not sure how he knows that, come to think of it—

“I’ve been Steve’s own personal Bucky Bear since we were kids, he always sleeps like this when we share a bed, it’s fine,” Barnes says, and okay, yeah, that’s a fair point. There are times Sam’s had to use some strategic tickling or elbowing to get free of Steve’s sleep cuddling grip. Steve’s never clung to Sam with as much intensity as he’s clinging to Barnes right now though.

“Alright, well, better you than me, Barnes,” Sam says.

“Bucky,” says Barnes. “Call me Bucky, please.”

A pleasant little shiver runs down Sam’s spine at the request, at the low and intimate register of Bucky’s voice.

“Yeah, okay. Surviving the apocalypse together feels like a first names kind of situation, sure,” Sam says, and now maybe he can barely make out the glint of Bucky’s smile in the dark rather than just guess at it.

He thinks Bucky falls asleep pretty quickly after that, and Sam does his best to follow his lead, but he’s got this feeling, this _you’ve forgotten something important_ kind of feeling, like he’s left the oven on or his keys in the door, or like there’s something incredibly important he should have done today and hadn’t. But he doesn’t have an oven anymore, or even keys for that matter, and the world’s already been saved. It’s just post-battle jitters, or the whole weird time displacement situation, probably.

Natasha shifts in her sleep, her head brushing against Sam’s chest, and he nearly jumps out of his skin, because that’s not right, he usually shares a bed with someone else, someone taller—except no, he doesn’t, at least not for a long, long time, what the hell. _Go the fuck to sleep, Wilson,_ he tells himself sternly. Things will make more sense tomorrow, or at the very least, he’ll be more used to them.

* * *

In the morning, Sam’s somehow the last to wake up, though only barely so judging by Natasha’s bleary eyes and Steve’s freshly showered exit from the bathroom. The situation is so familiar that for a long moment, Sam thinks the whole thing with Thanos had just been an especially bizarre nightmare, that five years haven’t passed and he and Steve and Nat are still on the run together, but no, Natasha’s hair is long and mostly red again, the still-blond ends like proof of time’s passage. And if it wasn’t all some really detailed nightmare, then where the hell is Bucky, and why is his absence making Sam feel faintly panicky?

“Where’s Bucky?” Sam asks in what he really hopes is an appropriately chill tone.

“Went to get us some breakfast,” Steve says, already casting an anxious look at the room’s closed door, like Bucky being out of sight is worrying him too.

“I’ve got dibs on the next shower,” Natasha says, so Sam puts up his customary protest, and it would almost be normal, unremarkable, if not for the way Natasha’s eyes shine with tears or the way her voice wavers with joy as she shoots back the usual snappy response before she disappears into the bathroom.

Sam distracts himself from the weird antsy feeling in his gut by asking Steve what the plan for the day is, and just when he’s about to snap and find some excuse to go looking for Bucky—which, _why_ , surely the former Winter Soldier can handle getting breakfast and anyway, Sam shouldn’t even care this much—he returns, carefully juggling a big brown paper bag in one hand and a tray of coffee in the other.

“How’s it looking out there?” asks Steve as he takes the tray from Bucky.

“People seem really happy, and really confused, like they’re in a good kind of shock.”

Bucky distributes wrapped breakfast sandwiches from the bag, and Sam raises an eyebrow at him.

“McDonalds?”

“It was the only place that was open.” He tosses a sandwich to Sam. “Extra bacon instead of ham, no cheese, just the way you like it.”

That is, in fact, just how Sam likes his guilty pleasure Egg McMuffins. Steve’s lifting a coffee cup from the tray, about to take a sip, when Bucky gracefully swipes it from his hand.

“Nuh uh, that one’s Sam’s. Yours is on the right. Wasn’t sure how Romanoff takes hers, but I brought some extra sugar and creamer.”

Bucky hands Sam his coffee, and he takes a sip, surprised when it tastes just like his usual: black coffee with two packets of Splenda, which doesn’t taste like poison at all, _Steve_.

“Thanks,” Sam says. “But how’d you know this is how I take my coffee? And how’d you know that’s how I like my Egg McMuffins?”

Maybe it’s a trivial thing to fixate on; after all, Steve probably told Bucky, or hell, maybe Bucky’s super spy assassin skills are just that good. But it’s one more weird thing on an already weird morning, and when Bucky’s forehead furrows in confusion, Sam’s both vindicated and concerned.

“I—I don’t know,” says Bucky.

Steve frowns over at both of them. “I didn’t tell him.”

Sam bites back a half-hearted joke about amnesia, and is glad he did when Bucky’s confusion shifts to him looking genuinely spooked and unsettled, frowning hard.

“Someone must have told me, but I don’t—I don’t remember,” he says. His jaw clenches for a second before he shakes off his distress, covering with a stiff smile. “What a surprise, the amnesiac has memory problems,” jokes Bucky, but his voice is just a little too shaky for the joke to land.

As Sam eats his Egg McMuffin, the food settling heavier in his gut than even McDonalds food should, he regrets having brought it up at all.

* * *

When the most urgent post-battle issues are taken care of, they get some down time and breathing room, enough for Sam to have more than a quick “I’m alive again,” phone call with his family. It’s a long, emotional video call; of his immediate family, only his sister Sarah had lived through the last five years, and their poor mom is totally overwhelmed by the whole situation. It’s all Sam can do to stop himself from strapping on his wings and flying down to Atlanta to hold onto them until everything makes sense again. But his mom is tough as hell, and it doesn’t take her long to come to grips with the situation. When she does, she urges Sam not to worry about them.

“You just keep helping to save the world, honey, your time’s better spent doing that than trying to get down here to us in all this chaos and confusion. Your sister and I will be fine,” his mom tells him.

“Just tell us it’s not going to happen again,” pleads his sister, and that, at least, Sam can do.

“Nothing left but the cleanup,” he promises. _And the funerals_ , he doesn’t add.

That there are only two funerals seems like a kind of miracle: whatever Stark had done when he had control of the Infinity Stones, it must have included saving anyone who may not have made it through the battle otherwise, because apart from Stark himself, no one else on their side had been killed. But Stark couldn’t save Barton, and he couldn’t save himself, and now the Avengers are left to mourn in a world that’s celebrating.

The Barton family has a small memorial service and a raucous wake on their farm, per Barton’s own wishes. _He always said he wanted his funeral to be a party_ , Natasha says, her mouth twisting into something too hurt to be a smile. Sam duly joins the toasts to Barton, and laughs through tears along with everyone else as they share stories of the late Hawkeye. If he feels oddly disconnected from the other mourners, if his laughs come a second too late, well, no one seems to notice, or if they do, they don’t care. He’s just one shellshocked mourner among many here. It doesn’t matter that he never knew Barton all that well: he’s here to honor the man’s sacrifice the way it deserves to be honored, and at the very least, he’s here for Steve and Nat’s sakes too.

A couple days later, it’s time for Stark’s funeral—the private funeral, that is, the one free of the media storm that’s fast brewing—and Sam feels even more superfluous and awkward here than he had at Barton’s wake. Despite being one of the recipients of Stark’s generosity with cool tech, Sam had known Stark even less well than he’d known Barton, and he’d been ambivalent at best about Stark on a personal level, an ambivalence that had nearly tipped over into genuine antipathy thanks to how things went down with the Accords and in Siberia. It’s been well over seven years now, but not for Sam, and Sam can admit that he’s the kind of person who has a real long statute of limitations on grudges. Which doesn’t feel great, given how Stark’s just died to help save the universe and all.

_Get over yourself, Wilson_ , he tells himself. _This isn’t about you_.

Lucky for Sam, there’s at least one person who’s definitely going to feel even more awkward and weird about Stark’s funeral than Sam does, and that person is Bucky. Bucky and some of the others had stayed behind at the motel that was serving as the Avengers’ HQ during Barton’s wake, on the off chance there’d be some new attack, and clearly Bucky’s been hoping he’d be able to do the same for Stark’s funeral.

No joy. When Bucky floats the idea, Steve goes full puppy dog eyes. Sam’s pretty sure no one can resist Steve’s big sad puppy dog eyes.

“Of course you have to come, Buck,” Steve tells Bucky.

“It just feels really awkward on account of how I murdered his parents,” Bucky says.

His tone and expression are admirably even, but he’s got some definite crazy eyes action happening, and despite the pleading look Bucky casts Sam’s way, Sam is not getting in the middle of this. If Sam can’t get out of this, he’s taking Bucky down with him.

Steve clasps Bucky’s shoulder comfortingly. “Tony forgave you for that, these last few years. He knew you didn’t do it willingly, that the blame was on HYDRA. I promise, no one’s gonna think it’s weird for you to be there.”

Sam easily translates the quickly suppressed twitch of Bucky’s eyebrows to mean _I think it’s pretty goddamn weird for me to be there, Steve!_ But Bucky must decide it’s not worth arguing about because he lets it go, and then talk turns to the logistics of getting everyone to Stark’s lake house for the service and how Steve and Natasha would be returning the Infinity Stones after that. After Steve and Natasha leave the motel room, Sam takes pity on Bucky.

“Hey, I’ll be your wingman for this funeral, if you want. We can lurk awkwardly in the back together.”

“Thank you,” Bucky tells him, with wide-eyed sincerity.

“No problem, man,” Sam says.

He ends up reconsidering the offer when he sees what Bucky’s wearing for the service.

“Where did you get a suit from?” asks Bucky, emerging from the motel room’s bathroom looking distinctly frazzled.

“Uh, Rhodey rustled one up for me, why are you dressed like you’re gonna roll up to Tony Stark’s funeral looking like his hot sidepiece sugar baby or whatever?”

And okay, Bucky’s in dark colors, yeah, but surely those black skinny jeans are not funeral-appropriate attire. They do look real good on Bucky’s long legs though, and add that to the slim cut of his black or maybe dark blue zipped jacket, and all in all, he’s a real tall drink of water right now, the dark colors making the blue-gray of his eyes especially sharp, his hair a little mussed as if he’s just gotten off a motorcycle and— _jesus, focus, Wilson, what the fuck_.

Sam has eyes, he knows Bucky’s a damn good-looking man, but that does not mean Sam thirsts after the guy, especially not when they’re about to go to a goddamn funeral. It’s just that Bucky’s narrow waist in that jacket is somehow very tempting right now, and Sam just knows his hands would neatly span that space, thumbs resting perfectly on the crest of Bucky’s hips—and okay, no, Sam is stopping this train of thirsty thought right in its tracks.

Sam’s never been given to post-battle and/or funeral-inspired horniness the way some people are, but there’s a first time for everything, he supposes.

Bucky must be totally unaware of the suddenly lusty turn of Sam’s thoughts, because he runs a hand through his hair and fidgets with his jacket as he says, “Okay, well, not all of us could rustle up a suit! I just came back from the dead, again, and if I even have any more clothes still, they’re all in Wakanda, so this is the best I could do!”

To Sam’s amused concern, Bucky hadn’t sounded this anxious when they were literally staring down an alien invasion. Somehow, his current display of obvious nerves is kind of charming.

“Alright, alright,” soothes Sam. He’s struck with the sudden urge to hug Bucky in apology for even bringing up the clothes issue, which is, wow, inappropriate and not at all the kind of relationship they have. _Why is Sam’s brain being like this_. “It’ll be fine, no one’s gonna care.”

Bucky does not seem much comforted by this, but Sam’s proven right, no one cares, if they even notice. He and Bucky stand near the back as Stark gets his final sendoff, the moment quiet and solemn, but full of gratitude too. In the end, Stark had done right by the world, and the universe, by making the ultimate sacrifice. It’s a genuine tragedy that Stark won’t live to see the new world he helped bring back from the brink of ruin.

Sam hears Bucky sniffle quietly, and mingled grief and affection fill Sam up so rapidly that they nearly overflow in tears. Leave it to Bucky goddamn Barnes to be genuinely sad at the funeral of a man who’d tried to kill him for things he’d done while brainwashed. He puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and when Bucky leans into it, Sam steps closer, lets his hand slide down to rest on Bucky’s lower back. He should be more surprised than he is about how easily his hand fits there, how readily Bucky sways towards him.

It’s just the weird situation, Sam tells himself. They’re getting what comfort they can from whoever they can. And if the position feels too familiar, if Sam has to keep himself from tugging Bucky even closer, if Sam keeps expecting Bucky to put his arm around Sam’s waist—it’s nothing, it’s just—just a weird manifestation of some suppressed need for good old-fashioned human contact.

* * *

After the funeral, Steve and Natasha suit up to return the Infinity Stones (and Thor’s hammer, apparently?) to their proper timelines. Sam still hasn’t got a good handle on this time travel bullshit, but he knows he doesn’t feel too great about Steve and Nat going on a mission where they’ll be cut off from any potential backup.

“We’ll be back in five seconds,” promises Natasha, which isn’t as comforting as she thinks it is, given Sam’s recent experience. He’d thought he’d only been gone a few seconds too, only to find out, nope! Five years had passed!

“You’ll barely have enough time to miss us,” adds Steve.

Any heavy goodbyes feel like admitting something could go wrong, so Sam settles for quick hugs from Steve and Nat, and even Steve and Bucky go with a short bro hug rather than their usual clingy bearhug. When Steve and Natasha blink out of sight, Sam can’t help the morbid thought that they’ve died just like Sam and Bucky and half of the rest of the world’s population had, and there aren’t any convenient magic rocks to bring them back.

“They’ll be fine,” murmurs Bucky, bumping Sam’s shoulder with his own. “Five seconds are almost up already.”

So Sam waits, counting down the last couple seconds, and okay it’s definitely been more than five seconds now, something’s gone wrong, how can they be late when they have a _time machine_ , maybe Steve and Nat aren’t coming back—

“Breathe, Sam,” says Bucky, his voice and face reflecting nothing but impossibly calm patience, and Sam hisses back, “It has been longer than five seconds! It’s been, like, fifteen! Banner, is something wrong? I knew we shouldn’t have—”

Just as Sam’s working up a proper panic, Banner says, “Quantum tunnel’s activating again,” and Steve and Natasha reappear.

They’re significantly more bedraggled than when they’d left: Steve has a beard again, and both of their quantum suits have gone grey with grime and maybe even blood—an object lesson in why superhero outfits should never be white—but they both seem more or less okay. And while Steve’s down a hammer, he seems to have picked up the shield again, because it’s on his back now, shiny and new, unlike the shattered version Steve was left with after the battle with Thanos.

“So? How’d it go?” Banner asks.

“Went off without a hitch,” reports Natasha with a grin. “Or, no big hitches anyway.”

“Oh good,” says Banner, then he squints over at Steve. “Wait, is that your shield? Please don’t tell me you stole your shield from some other timeline’s version of you.”

“I didn’t _steal_ my own shield,” says Steve. “Some other timeline’s version of me _gave_ it to me.”

Banner scowls, a distressingly Hulk-like expression, then he sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“You know what, whatever! Whatever! If the multiverse collapses, it’s your fault.”

Steve and Natasha pay Banner no heed, both of them heading straight for Sam and Bucky.

“How long was it for you two?” asks Sam, as Natasha hugs him tightly. “And what did y’all get up to aside from returning the Infinity Stones?”

Natasha kisses him on the cheek, still smiling, a welcome twinkle in her eye rather than weary grief. “Don’t worry about it,” she advises.

When Sam glances over at Steve to gauge just how much he should or shouldn’t be worrying about it, he sees Steve and Bucky wrapped up in each other, Steve’s mouth close to Bucky’s ear as he tells him something. There’s an odd mix of joy and grief on Steve’s face, and Sam’s not sure if he should be concerned about the tight clench of Bucky’s fist in the fabric of Steve’s uniform, but then Bucky lifts his face from Steve’s shoulder and he’s smiling, albeit tearfully.

“Of course it matters, Steve, thank you,” Bucky says, and when Sam raises his eyebrows at him, a silent _everything okay?_ Bucky just nods, a short, _don’t worry_ kind of gesture. Before Sam can wonder just when he became so fluent in the language of Bucky, Bucky lets Steve go and pushes him towards Sam, and it’s Sam’s turn for his own personal clingy hug from Steve.

“Everything alright?” Sam asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, everything’s perfect. Just—I wanna ask you something. C’mon.”

Steve leads Sam away from the quantum tunnel platform and over towards the lake, where there’s a bench. He unclips the shield from the harness on his back and sets it down with a relieved sigh before he sits down on the bench with a heaviness that betrays how tired he is. Sam notices all over again the small but unmistakable signs of age and sorrow on Steve’s face: the way the furrow on his brow seems permanent now, the deeper brackets around his mouth. He hopes it’s not too late to smooth them out a little, replace them with evidence of happiness instead.

“This isn’t bad news, is it?” Sam asks as he sits next to Steve

“No,” says Steve thoughtfully. “I don’t think it is, anyway. Not for me, and hopefully not for you either.” Steve rests his hands on the edge of the shield, looks down as he smooths one fond hand over the shield’s edge. “I’m done being Cap, Sam. I’ve been done for a while, if I’m honest. It’s been a long time since I could be the kind of Captain America the world needs.”

“Is this about the Accords? Because Rhodey told me there’s no way they’re—”

Steve shakes his head and interrupts him. “It’s not about the Accords, no. When I took up the shield, it was to fight a war. And I’m not sure that’s what the world needs anymore, not from me and not from Captain America.”

“So you’re retiring,” says Sam, and Steve nods. Sam puts a hand on Steve’s shoulder, squeezes. “That’s definitely not bad news. I’m happy for you, Steve. This has been a long time coming, yeah?”

“Yeah, it has,” says Steve, with one of his trademark sad smiles. “World still needs Captain America though,” he adds, then he lifts up the shield and holds it out to Sam. “So, what do you say? You up for it?”

Sam takes the shield from Steve’s hands on autopilot as his thoughts race. He can’t take his eyes off the shield— _his_ shield? The words didn’t compute. “Steve, I—”

“Before you say anything, just—you gotta know, I spent a lot of the last five years thinking, _what would Sam do_? _What would Bucky do?_ And the answer was always, _help people, don’t give up_. So I did my best: I found a support group, and after a while, I led one myself.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Steve his smile gone more sweet than sad now. “And I don’t know if I’m the best at it, but I think—I think I know better than anyone what it feels like to lose years and come back to a world you don’t recognize. I think helping people deal with that is how I can do the most good. And I think the kind of Captain America the world could really use right now isn’t the guy who was made for the war, but the guy who was made for the rescue.”

Sam wipes tears from his eyes before they can fall. “Jesus, you oughta give a guy a warning before you give him that kinda speech in such close quarters.”

“So? What do you say? You can take time to think it over, of course—”

He should take the time, maybe, but Sam finds that he already has an answer for Steve.

“Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll—” Sam laughs, struck by how unlikely and amazing the words he’s about to say sound. “I’ll be Captain America.”

* * *

After Steve leaves to give him some quiet time to process, Sam runs his fingers over every inch of the shield, mapping its smooth surface and the curve of its edge. He’s held the shield before, even used it, but now it’s _his_. The little kid inside Sam is giddy, like this is just another game of make-believe and finally he gets to be Cap. Adult Sam knows it’s more than that: it’s an honor and a privilege and a burden all wrapped up together, and he hopes to god he can do right by it.

“No need to start panicking already,” says Bucky, and sits beside him. Sam hadn’t even noticed Bucky joining him at the bench, but somehow, he’s not surprised either. “You’re gonna be a great Cap.”

“You think so?”

Bucky smiles, the close-contact blast of brightness of it enough to warm Sam up like he’s got a small sun sitting right next to him.

“I do,” he says, soft and sure. Sam should make some kind of joke, or maybe he should even doubt Bucky’s motives in saying it, but instead, he’s actually goddamn moved, the sheer certainty of Bucky’s words enough to fill Sam with hopeful, wondering resolve. “Don’t think you should give up your old superhero callsign entirely though. I kinda like the sound of Falcap.”

And there it is, the catch. Bucky’s grinning goofily as he nudges Sam’s shoulder, and Sam laughs, charmed despite himself. 

“That’s really what you’re going with? I’d have thought Captain Birdmerica was more your speed.”

Now Bucky’s laughing, and Sam’s immediate reaction is of delight—finally, he’s goddamn managed to get a real, proper laugh out of Bucky, even if Sam’s made far better jokes before that were a lot more deserving of this particular prize—but that delight is swiftly followed by a baffling sense of comfortable familiarity, like this isn’t a new sight at all, like Sam’s often angling for a laugh from Bucky and usually getting it.

Something like deja vu hits Sam with such suddenness he’s dizzy with it. Sam’s certainty that this moment is familiar crashes up wildly against the reality that it isn’t, that at most Sam goads Bucky with jokes and light ribbing to get the guy to lighten up, that they’re not close enough to justify all of today’s casual touches and easy conversation. Maybe Bucky realizes the same thing, because he goes stiff and tense beside Sam with whiplash speed, and the air of unforced comfort between them disappears like it had never been there at all. But it had been, and Sam doesn’t know where the hell it had come from.

Neither does Bucky, apparently, because he stands up abruptly. “I have to—I’m gonna go find Steve,” he says, and walks off, fast enough to almost be jogging.

* * *

Later, Sam finds Wanda back at the lake house, accepts her hug of congratulations for the Cap thing before pulling her aside. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Have you been having...I don’t know, like, a lot of weird deja vu since we came back? Or do you keep feeling like you’ve forgotten something, something important?”

Wanda frowns, shakes her head slowly. “No...mostly I’ve just been missing Viz,” she says.

“Shit, I’m sorry—” starts Sam, and Wanda cuts him off with a quick touch to his arm.

“It’s alright, Shuri told me she thinks he can be restored, though it will take time and he will lack his powers.”

“Yeah? I’m glad to hear it, then,” he says, and Wanda gives him a watery, grateful smile.

“Thanks, Sam. So what’s this about deja vu?”

“It’s nothing, probably. Just some kinda weird side effect of missing five years or coming back from the dead, I bet,” Sam tells her, and tries for a breezy, reassuring smile.

“I can take a quick look around inside your head for any undue influence,” Wanda offers.

Sam bites back his automatic denial; it’s creepy sure, but Wanda’s powers are undeniably effective, and he knows she’s careful with them. Having her poke around a bit is probably worth the discomfort.

“Yeah, could you? I’m just—weirded out by this whole back from the dead thing, I guess.”

She smiles reassuringly at him as she brings her hands up to his temples. “I don’t blame you,” she says. “Now just relax, this won’t take long. I’ll only look for any sign of outside influence.”

Like she says, it doesn’t take long, and he doesn’t feel a thing, apart from the odd sensation of another presence in his head, careful and distant, and somehow very red. Just as he’s noticed it, it withdraws, and he finds he’s closed his eyes. He opens them again to Wanda’s gentle smile.

“No one but you in there, and no sign of any other influence or tampering.”

“Thanks, Wanda,” he says.

So alright, it’s just a weird side effect, Sam tells himself. If some jarring deja vu is the only consequence of being fully dead for five years, he’s getting off lightly.

* * *

After the funerals, the slow work of recovery starts in earnest. The Avengers and company relocate to Avengers Tower back in Manhattan with Pepper’s blessing and Rhodey’s help. The old Avengers’ floors there are dusty and empty, and the place feels strange without Stark’s presence—Sam half expects Stark to have installed himself as an AI, ready to activate upon his death and haunt them all—but it’s only FRIDAY who welcomes them, powering everything up again with a cheerful _welcome back_. Just having a familiar base of operations and place to live helps Sam feel steadier, less unmoored.

Sticking together with Steve, Nat, Wanda, and Bucky helps too, even if Bucky had been distinctly nervous about stepping into Avengers Tower.

“Honestly, I’m kinda expecting a robot to shoot me on sight,” he’d muttered, eyes darting around suspiciously, until Steve had just pushed him inside the lobby.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a fancy shield now, I’ve got you covered,” Sam had told Bucky, surprised to find the words coming out with far more sincerity than lightness.

But hell, having Bucky’s back is the bare minimum, isn’t it? And it’s not weird to stay in Steve’s old apartment in the Tower together rather than use the other guest rooms, not if Steve and Nat are there too. The fact that Sam automatically heads for Bucky’s chosen bedroom at the end of the day is just—Sam’s just tired, is all, and it’s the room he’d have picked first if he’d had the chance. And if having a bed to himself again feels weird and lonely, well, that’s just because he’s been keeping close quarters with Steve and Nat for so long.

* * *

That night, he dreams for the first time since coming back, or at least, it’s the first time he remembers his dream: a flaming amber sunset, and arms wrapped around him, a warm voice murmuring in his ear—but he can’t hear what it’s saying, is desperate to know what that beloved voice is saying, because maybe then he’ll know why he feels so happy and so sad all at once.

When he wakes up, there are tears on his cheeks, and something deep inside of him is aching. It’s almost a good ache, like the kind he gets after he goes on a long hike, tired but grateful for it. But god, it still hurts, a tight kind of pain like his heart is reaching for something it has no hope of catching.

“Riley?” Sam whispers into the pre-dawn dark, as if his most beloved ghost has come back for one last sweet haunting.

There’s no answer, of course. There hasn’t been for a long time.

* * *

With a real base of operations established, the Avengers step up to tell the world the whole wild story of what went down with Thanos and the Infinity Stones; at least, the whole story apart from the time travel parts, on the reasonable grounds that the last thing they need is everyone knowing time travel is possible.

“We are not kicking off some Terminator-style time travel arms race,” Rhodey had declared. “Not on my watch.”

Banner had sighed and nodded, looking kind of wistful about it. “We should probably destroy the quantum tunnel, just in case.”

Steve takes the opportunity to publicly pass the shield on to Sam, and to commit himself to supporting the Avengers’ global recovery efforts rather than actively superheroing. He gives a hell of a heartfelt speech about why Sam deserves the shield that has Sam barely holding back tears, but Sam gets it together enough to give his own speech, a short and sweet promise about the kind of Captain America he hopes to be: standing up to bullies and fighting the fights that need fighting, but always focusing on the people who need protection, who need rescue.

The soundbite that ends up all over the news cycle is of Sam’s closing words: “I’m just another soldier who wants to do right by everything this shield stands for, but more than that, I’m pararescue too. And I can promise all of you now that I’ll always live by the pararescue motto, that it will guide everything I do as Cap: _so that others may live_.”

He’s not quite the orator Steve is, but it goes over pretty well anyway.

When they return to Steve’s apartment, Bucky’s sitting on the couch, watching the news play a clip of Sam’s speech. All the nerves Sam had avoided during the press conference and while actually giving the damn speech start jangling now.

Shit, _everyone_ is going to see this, he realizes. Not just the reporters who’d been at the press conference, not just the other Avengers, but _everyone._ He’s not a minor superhero anymore, he’s _Captain America_. The Sam Wilson on the TV screen looks the part at least, with the shield on his arm, his expression emotional but dignified while Steve, Nat, and Rhodey look on with beaming pride. Here and now, Bucky glances over his shoulder at Sam, his bright eyes creased up in a smile.

“Not bad, for your first Captain America speech,” says Bucky, and most of Sam’s nerves fall away.

“Yeah?” he says, and nods at the TV screen. “How’re the other reviews?”

“Pretty damn good. Though even if they weren’t, fuck ‘em. You’re doing great.”

The positivity drowns out the predictable racist outrage at any rate, and even the worst of that dies down after a couple news cycles. The world’s too grateful, and too busy dealing with the fallout of half the population reappearing, to spare much time for tearing Sam or the Avengers down. While Banner and Stark were exactly the kind of geniuses who could account for the logistical complications of restoring half the universe to life and wiping Thanos out—Banner had said _I thought of it like a really complex bit of code to execute, put in a lot of conditions to make sure people were returned safely, and I know Tony would have done the same too_ —they couldn’t do shit about all the interpersonal and sociopolitical fallout.

Though maybe even that will prove to be more short-lived than expected.

Given that people are starting to call the last five years the Blip instead of the far more apocalyptic Decimation, Sam’s getting the impression that the world is real keen on treating the last five years like a weird, inconvenient aberration. There’s also a whole lot of backpedaling going on when it comes to the Accords, pardons and apologies being thrown around like candy as the Accords are redrafted into something less rife for abuse.

Unfortunately, Bucky’s situation is a little more complicated, and Bucky, Steve, and T’Challa decide it’s safest if he waits it out in Wakanda while the lawyers handle it. Logically, Sam knows they’re right, and he even agrees. And yet, here he is, stomach fluttering unhappily at the prospect of Bucky leaving, for reasons he straight up does not understand.

_The former Winter Soldier is not your security blanket,_ Sam tells himself firmly, because whatever projection or displacement or what-the-fuck-ever is making him be all weird about Bucky Barnes, he’s got to get over it. They barely even know each other, for fuck’s sake.

Still, it’s only polite to see the guy off. Sam’s not sure when they’ll see each other again, after all. So when the Wakandan talon jet comes to pick Bucky up, he goes up to the Tower’s roof with Steve and Nat and Wanda to say goodbye.

“We’ll get this all worked out soon,” Natasha assures Bucky, or maybe she’s reassuring Steve, who does not look at all ready to let Bucky go.

Sam’s honestly still not sure whether Steve’s new willingness to hug is a sign of personal growth or a symptom of his trauma, but the hugs seem reasonably therapeutic, and Bucky clearly doesn’t mind, even if he does look faintly exasperated.

“I’m not headed off to the front, Steve,” he says, rubbing Steve’s back. “You can still come visit me in Wakanda any time, you’re not a fugitive anymore, remember?”

Steve loosens his grip on Bucky a fraction. “Oh yeah,” he says and lets Bucky go, a sheepish grin on his face. “See you next weekend then?”

Bucky rolls his eyes and grins. “Yeah, sure. Bring me bagels!”

Sam offers Bucky his hand to shake, because even if Bucky looks like he gives really good hugs, they are not at a hugging kind of place in their weird almost-friends, almost-teammates relationship, and Bucky agrees apparently, because he reaches out to take Sam’s hand.

Later, Sam will realize: it’s the first time they’ve touched, skin-to-skin, since coming back from the dead.

In the moment though, it’s as if everything since he’s been returned to life was just him fighting his way through a layer of thick and chilly clouds and only now is he breaking through to clear skies and hot sunshine. The strange, almost ignorable pull he’s been feeling towards Bucky snaps tight and flares into zinging, overwhelming light and heat, like Sam’s the kite and Bucky’s the string, and they’ve both just been struck by goddamn lightning.

Bucky yanks his hand back, eyes wide.

“What the—”

“Holy—”

“Uh, you two okay?” asks Natasha.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam says absently, still feeling the pull, the lightning, a bright line of shock running between him and Bucky. He rubs at his palm, half expecting to feel the crackle of static on his skin. “Just, uh, static electricity I guess.”

Bucky looks back at him, his eyes as wide and faultless as the skies above them. “I guess, yeah,” he says, not sounding especially convinced.

But that has to be all it was, Sam thinks wildly. Because what the hell else could it be?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: a character has a nightmare-induced panic/anxiety attack. There are some non-invasive medical tests performed on two characters.

It wasn’t weird static electricity. That becomes rapidly evident to Sam as he goes about the rest of his day, because he feels...weird. He feels kind of like he had when Wanda had poked gently around in his head, only instead of the vague sense of a distant presence, like someone tiptoeing around the periphery of his mind, this is something much closer, something decidedly not-him, like his mind has a window or a door into someone else’s, or maybe like he’s got a sudden mental next-door neighbor. He can feel things, kind of, through the metaphorical adjoining wall—distant worry and confusion, some kind of conflicted want—as if it’s the murmur of someone else’s TV, but he knows it’s not him feeling it.

It’s strange as hell, and Sam quite genuinely wonders if he’s having some kind of psychotic break. But as suddenly as the feeling had come, it passes, subsiding back into the same, persistent nagging sense that he’s missing something, just like he’s had ever since coming back.

Sam has got to get himself to therapy or a support group or something soon, he resolves, and shoves all the weird feelings away to deal with later. He’s got Captain America duties to attend to now, he doesn’t have time to indulge this nonsense.

* * *

Maybe Sam doesn’t have time to indulge this possible-mental-break nonsense, but it sure has time to indulge him. The next day, it’s like that internal door or window has been thrown wide open to let in a cool, calm breeze, bringing a focused kind of serenity with it that fills Sam up until he feels light as a balloon. The steady calm sure as hell isn’t Sam himself: he’s in the middle of reading some reports on the events of the last five years, catching up on what he’s missed, and it’s not exactly the kind of reading material that inspires zen-like calm.

He won’t say no to a break though, even if the impetus for it is baffling. Sam sets down his reading and just breathes for a few minutes, his lungs falling into a deep and even rhythm seemingly without any conscious input from Sam.

 _Well, if I’m going crazy, at least it’s a nice kind of crazy_ , he thinks, and isn’t sure if the ripple of amusement he feels is his own or not.

* * *

“Don’t forget to take Bucky his ridiculous everything bagels,” Sam tells Steve when he comes into the apartment kitchen, duffel bag on his shoulder.

It’s time for Steve’s weekend trip to Wakanda, and Sam’s honestly kind of jealous. Chilling in the Wakandan countryside sounds like a pretty great way to pass a long weekend. Sam’s got Cap responsibilities now though, and he can’t go jetting off without good reason.

Steve makes a face and rolls his eyes. “As if I need a reminder when he’s been texting me about it for the last few days. Really getting the feeling he’s way more excited about eating bagels than seeing me. Don’t tell me he’s been texting you his bagel order too.”

“God forbid he not have his everything bagels with herb cream cheese,” says Sam, and snorts. “Seriously, is the everything on the bagel not enough, he’s gotta have more stuff in the cream cheese?”

“Exactly! Well, tell him his bagels are on the way, along with his best friend,” Steve says.

Only once Steve’s left does Sam realize: Bucky hadn’t texted him about the damned bagels. Sam has never once, in his life, discussed bagel preferences with Bucky. So how the fuck does he know about it?

* * *

Sam spends all weekend obsessing over how the hell he knows about Bucky’s bagel preferences, and how the hell Bucky had known about Sam’s breakfast preferences, and whether either of those things have anything to do with the whole bizarre handshake situation. When he imagines telling someone else about it, it sounds crazy: _Bucky and I know each other’s breakfast preferences and I got a tingly feeling when I shook his hand, something is wrong_.

For one thing, he knows for a fact that Natasha’s eyes would just go wide and delighted, her lips curling into a smile. _Aww, do you have a crush, Sam_? And Sam does not have a crush, alright? He has eyes is what he has, and anybody with eyes can recognize that Bucky Barnes is a good-looking dude, and anybody who knows what Bucky’s been through would find his smile heartwarming and lovely and worth coaxing out at every opportunity. None of that is what’s concerning here, what’s _concerning_ is their mutual mysteriously acquired knowledge about each other and the possible mental break.

So, yeah, no, Sam is not telling anybody shit, not yet.

He’s still turning it over in his head when he’s training on Sunday morning, half his attention on practicing with the shield and half on contemplating his awareness of that mysterious other presence both in and not in his head; the feeling of calm hasn’t returned, but it’s been replaced with a vague impression of pleasant occupation, like he’s got a neighbor who’s puttering around and playing soft, happy music. It leaves Sam with the reassuring certainty that he’s not alone and that everything’s just fine.

As nice and unobtrusive as the feeling is, it’s still just distracting enough that Sam catches the rebound of his latest shield toss just a half-second too late. He stops some of its momentum, but the shield still slams into his chest edge on, and even with the light force of an easy throw’s rebound, it’s enough to make him fall flat on his back, winded and staggered by the pain.

 _Well, this is gonna be a really unpleasant bruise_ , Sam thinks as he sucks in a careful, wheezy breath through the sharp and pounding ache in his chest. For a few seconds, he worries that he’s done himself a serious injury, but after a few more slow breaths, the worst of the pain subsides into the ache of a rapidly forming deep bruise. Even as the pain fades though, alarm spikes through Sam, only it’s not his alarm.

“Do you require medical assistance, Mr. Wilson?” FRIDAY asks solicitously.

“Nah, I’m fine,” he says, and sits up slowly, wincing. “I’ll swing by the infirmary, just in case.”

The nurse on call gives him the all-clear and a couple ibuprofen, and he’s just downing the pills when his phone rings: Steve.

“Hey, you okay?” asks Steve.

“Uh, yeah, why wouldn’t I be? Everything okay over there in Wakanda?”

“It’s fine, we’re fine, it’s just—uh, Bucky was sure—he thought you might be hurt?”

A shiver runs down Sam’s spine and he can hear the urgent murmur of another voice, but he can’t make out the words.

“Just a bruise,” says Sam. “Was training this morning, didn’t catch the shield in time. Took a hit from the giant frisbee, but I’m fine.”

Steve sighs in relief. “Okay, I’m glad. Wait, Buck—”

Bucky’s voice cuts in, his usual soft-spoken tone gone sharp and worried. “Are you _sure_ you didn’t break a rib—”

“How do you know he got hit in the chest—” Sam hears Steve’s baffled voice ask in the background.

“I’m fine, went to the nurse and everything,” Sam tells Bucky, like this is a normal conversation, like it’s not weird as hell that Bucky knows that Sam got hurt and where. So it’s not just Sam, whatever’s going on; it’s not just Sam being crazy. The thought is simultaneously a relief and deeply disquieting. But shit, Sam has to know. “Did you feel it?”

A nerve-jangling rush of confused distress—definitely his own but definitely someone else’s too—makes Sam’s heart rate go up.

“I—maybe, I don’t know—”

Sam wants to push, suddenly annoyed, because how the hell can Bucky say he doesn’t know now, after he’s had Steve goddamn call Sam for a wellness check?

Steve must succeed in grabbing the phone back from Bucky, because his voice comes through next. “What is going on with you two?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Sam says, apparently in unison with Bucky. Sam takes a breath and adds, “It’s—it’s probably nothing, don’t worry about it.”

* * *

At this point, it’s pretty clear that whatever’s happening, it’s happening to both Sam and Bucky.

Why it’s him and Bucky, Sam doesn’t know; hell, maybe their piles of dust had gotten mixed up or something, which—okay, that’s both distressingly possible and a thing he doesn’t want to think about at all.

It’ll pass, Sam tells himself. It’s probably some weird side effect of being resurrected, and it’s nothing, and it’ll pass.

So he’s just gonna ignore it, and apparently Bucky’s doing the same, because Sam hasn’t heard a damned peep from him. Which is fine. They can both just ignore this whole thing and wait it for it to fade away or whatever, because it definitely will.

* * *

When Steve returns, he greets Sam with a careful hug and a long, searching look.

“You’re really doing alright?” he asks.

Sam rolls his eyes, and shove Steve gently back. “It’s just a bruise, come on.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Steve says, frowning.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Sam tells him again, and hopes like hell it’s true.

* * *

Of course, a few days later, as a routine afternoon briefing is wrapping up, Sam proves there’s definitely something to worry about.

Sam’s had anxiety attacks before, but they’ve always been slow-burning things, a steady ratcheting up of tension that leaves him shaky and unable to stay still. So when he’s plunged into abrupt terror and horror, like he’s just fallen into icy water, so sudden and total that it takes his breath away, Sam knows: it’s not him. But his heart’s pounding and he’s gasping for breath, and everything takes on a sick tinge of disbelieving dread, like he’s stuck in that tipping point moment of a nightmare, the moment just before you realize you’re asleep and you need to wake up. Only Sam’s already awake, he’s _awake_ , and he knows, he _knows_ that whatever this nightmare fear is, it’s real, it was real, it had actually happened—

“Sam! Sam, are you alright? What’s wrong—Natasha, call Dr. Cho—c’mon, you gotta breathe in nice and slow—”

Steve’s clutching at him, eyes wide with worry, and Sam tries to focus, but he’s shaking, hard. If this is coming from Bucky’s end of whatever weird shit is happening to them, then something’s wrong, something’s really wrong—

“It’s Bucky, Steve you gotta call Bucky, he’s—”

“What? Sam, what’s going on, why do you think Bucky’s in danger—”

Sam struggles for control, but it’s like that door in his head has a blizzard howling through it. “I can’t explain it, I just—Steve, I just _know_ , you gotta call him.”

“I haven’t gotten any alerts about any emergencies in Wakanda,” says Natasha, already on her phone. “Hang on, I’ll call Barnes. Sam, whatever’s going on, we’ll figure it out, alright?”

If he focuses on Steve’s tight grip on him, on Natasha’s serious and calm expression, it’s a little easier to bear the secondhand panic, so that’s what he does, though that has the downside of letting some of Sam’s own fear leak in. If something’s happened to Bucky—

“He’s not answering,” says Natasha.

“Try Thandiwe, she’s his healer in the village, here, I have her number—”

Just as Steve fumbles for his phone, it’s as if that odd door in Sam’s head has slammed shut, and somehow, that’s worse than the raging blizzard of icy fear, because now there’s _nothing,_ nothing but a terrible silence. Sam’s knees give out, his vision graying, and he loses track of things for a bit as he reels from the aftershocks of too-intense feeling, until he feels Natasha’s hands slapping lightly at his cheeks. She’s crouching in front of him, and Sam’s sitting—they’re back in the conference room they’d just had the briefing in.

“Sam, c’mon, hey, you with us?”

He blinks and focuses in on her worried green eyes. “I—yeah. Did you—”

“Got a hold of Thandiwe,” says Steve. “Bucky was just having a bad nightmare, he’s fine, she’s sitting up with him now.” Steve puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder, and gives him an anxious once-over. “Sam, how did you know? What’s going on? First Bucky knows when you got hurt, and now you know when Bucky’s having a nightmare…”

Sam puts his head in his hands and shakes his head. So much for ignoring it and waiting for it to pass.

“I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know, all I know is things have been weird, since we came back, and I know things about Bucky that I’ve got no business knowing, and same for him with me.” He looks up at Steve. All this thanks to a nightmare? If that’s all it was, why the hell has everything gone so damn quiet? “You’re sure he’s alright? I can’t—I can’t tell right now, and—”

Except he can, all of a sudden. A distant impression of exhausted misery reaches him, and Sam tries to mentally reach out to it, offer some comfort or something, but it—Bucky, it’s got to be Bucky—draws away. Not entirely, Sam can still tell someone’s there, on the other side of this door or link or whatever it is, but there’s a definite muffled distance now.

“He’ll be alright, he’s got friends in his village,” says Steve, and offers Sam a hand up from the conference room chair, his forehead still furrowed deeply with concern. “C’mon, let’s get you to the infirmary, get you checked out.”

* * *

Sam’s tests and scans all come up clear, matching his baseline from before he’d been dusted in the first battle with Thanos, which is partly a relief and partly a disappointment. He’d half been hoping for a clear diagnosis: _you came back wrong or weird, and this is why_. But hey, at least Sam doesn’t have a brain tumor.

To cover the non-medical bases, Wanda takes another look around Sam’s head, and this time she says she can sense something, though she rules out magic and mind control.

“Whatever it is, it’s not in your _mind_ , exactly, and there’s no malice or danger in it,” she says, then grimaces apologetically. “I’m sorry, perhaps if I had more skill, or if I went deeper, I could tell you more, but I’m not willing to risk hurting you.”

“That’s alright, Wanda,” Sam tells her, and Steve nods.

“Eliminating magic and mind control is a great start,” he says.

Later on, over a video conference, Shuri confirms that Bucky’s tests and scans have all come up clear too, and then it’s time to compare notes on what they’ve all figured out so far.

It’s not much. Sam and Bucky both have to answer a lot of questions, questions neither of them really know the answers to, and Sam’s really wishing they’d had a chance to talk it over, just the two of them, before it became Avengers business. Up on the screen, Bucky’s hard to read, his expression closed off, and if this thing between them is a door, or a window, it’s one that Bucky’s keeping locked and dead bolted, shutters drawn, no light or sound leaking out, nothing but the faint certainty that there’s someone on the other side. Sam would maybe be doing the same thing, if only he had any idea how, so it shouldn’t rankle that Bucky is. It’s just one more thing that’s making Sam feel off-balance though, and he finds himself resenting Bucky’s control.

He also resents the hell out of all these questions, because most of them have no good answers. When did he notice something was off? When _isn’t_ Sam noticing that something is off, is the better question.

“Oh, I don’t know, around the time I came back to life and a wizard told me to go through a portal to fight more aliens? A lot of things felt weird starting about then!”

And of course, that just gets Sam the Captain America Is Disappointed in You face. Or, wait, Sam’s Cap now, so this is just Steve Rogers’ own judgey face.

“Sam, we’re just trying to figure out what’s going on, make sure you and Bucky aren’t in any kind of danger.”

“I get that, I do, but I haven’t got any answers for you. I just kept feeling like I was supposed to stick with Bucky, and then we shook hands and everything got real weird.”

Bucky shrugs, and finally his carefully passive expression gives way to a sad-eyed frown that, shit, means Bucky’s actually upset.

“Same for me. I just—it feels like I’ve forgotten a lot, it feels like I have amnesia again.” Bucky crosses his arms, clearly more of a self-soothing gesture than a defensive one, given the hunch of his shoulders.

“Whatever is happening, we can at least conclude that it isn’t immediately dangerous,” says Shuri. “So I say Bucky continues meditating and practicing his mental discipline, and Mr. Wilson can maybe try the same, while we try to gather additional information.”

“Wait, meditating? Is that what the deal is with the—” Sam makes a vague twirling gesture with his hand, trying to encompass the whole brief attack of zen he’d had earlier in the week. “You know.”

Bucky just raises his eyebrows. “It’s probably not a good sign that I do know,” he says dryly, then his expression takes on a nervous, shy kind of tinge. “But yeah, that’s—I meditate a lot, I guess. It helps with—with everything.”

Which makes sense for Bucky, and Sam’s happy he’s on a spiritual journey of healing or whatever in Wakanda, but yeah, Sam doesn’t meditate. He knows it works for some people, but Sam’s not one of them. He hasn’t got it in him to stay still and quiet and alone like that. Give him a good long run any day, that’s as close he gets to meditation. Though now he supposes he can get the secondhand experience of it through Bucky, and isn’t that a trip.

“I guess I could try some yoga or something,” he says, and Shuri rolls her eyes.

“Or just keep a log of any strange symptoms or feelings. We need more data before we can ascertain what is happening here.”

“More data…” says Natasha thoughtfully, almost to herself. “You think any of the other people who came back are having some of the same symptoms?”

“What, a direct line to Bucky Barnes’ brain?” asks Sam.

“No, I mean the phantom sensations, knowing things they didn’t know before, that kind of thing.”

“I haven’t really noticed anything myself,” offers Shuri, but she’s frowning thoughtfully. “It hasn’t been all that long though. I will ask around among those who have returned here.”

“I can check in with my support groups,” adds Steve. “And Sam, maybe if you could go to some other groups, ask around there?”

Sam nods, relieved to have something concrete to do at last. “Yeah, sure. I’d been planning to go anyway.”

“And I’ll see what people are saying on the internet,” says Natasha.

Just the possibility that this could be happening to other people makes Sam feel a little better, a little less like it’s just his world that’s been turned totally sideways. It doesn’t seem like it’s doing the same for Bucky though; he’s still wound tight, his shoulders hunched and a tense frown on his face. After some more plans for gathering information are tossed around, the video conference winds down, and before Sam can ask Bucky if they can talk, the call ends.

Okay, fair enough, maybe it’s not the best time with all the others standing right there, and admittedly, Sam’s not even sure of what they can say to each other. _Sorry for the inconvenience? I’ll try to ignore this weird, suspicious bond we’ve developed from out of nowhere, hope you do the same too?_ There’s no etiquette for this kind of situation.

That doesn’t stop Sam from feeling kind of like Bucky’s ghosting him though, and he’s pissed about it: pissed about the ridiculousness of feeling rejected of all things, and pissed about how little control he has over any of this. And under it all, there’s still that bone-deep certainty: he’s missing something, there’s something important just out of his reach, and he’s not sure he’ll like the answer when he finds out what it is.

* * *

Sam had maybe been premature with the whole ghosting thing yesterday, because Bucky does call him the next day. Sam’s got a whole speech ready to go, all about how they should make the best of this and not make it into a whole big thing, and the importance of boundaries, and how maybe Bucky could try not to keep doing the actual and possibly metaphysical equivalent of leaving him on read all the damn time, because mystery bond post-magical resurrection is the kind of thing they should really check in with each other about, but of course Bucky derails Sam’s carefully thought out speech.

“I wanted to apologize for the other day. I’m sorry you got hit with—with my nightmare. I’ll—I’m gonna try to stay in control better, try to keep you from getting stuck with any of my shit.”

“What?” asks Sam, because this does not fit in anywhere in Sam’s planned speech. He recovers quickly enough, and says, “Bucky, c’mon, you can’t help your nightmares. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

Had he noticed Sam’s anger after the video conference? Shit, Sam hopes not, and fights down a surge of guilt before Bucky can feel that too. He’s not pissed at Bucky, he reminds himself. He’s _not_.

“Well, I’m sorry anyway,” says Bucky. “I know you didn’t ask for this, whatever the hell this is, so I’m just—I learned a lotta meditation and, I don’t know, mental focus stuff as part of my, uh, recovery here, so I’ll just—be doing that, I guess. I hope it helps.”

Part of Sam is reflexively annoyed—what, is it that much of a trial to have a direct line to Sam that Bucky’s gotta act like this is some kind of condition to be managed, another traumatic thing to be dealt with along with all the rest?—but it’s an unkind thought. Bucky’s got plenty of reasons to find this upsetting, given his history with mental manipulation. If he wants to shore up his boundaries however he can, Sam can’t really blame him.

He can’t help but wonder though, is it really that bad on Bucky’s end?

“What’s it like, for you?” Sam asks.

“Huh?”

“This—this thing, this weird thing, what’s it like on your end?”

Bucky’s silent for a long moment, long enough that it gets awkward over a voice-only line where Sam can’t read his face or body language, but eventually Bucky says, “Not sure I’ve got the right words for it. It’s a lot like the way it feels when I remember something halfway, I guess. Like, I know it, but I don’t know how or why I know it. Or it feels like when me and Thandiwe meditate together, sort of. Like—being open on the inside, maybe, and I know there’s someone else there. You, apparently.” Sam can’t entirely parse Bucky’s tone there, and before he can ask anything else, Bucky says, “What—what’s it like for you?”

“Like my head’s an apartment and I’ve got a noisy next-door neighbor.”

“Sorry,” says Bucky quietly, and Sam winces. That had come out sharper than he’d intended.

“Hey, no, it’s—I don’t mean it in a bad way. I meant—it’s like, sometimes when you live alone, it’s nice to know there’s someone else nearby, doing their thing. It, uh, felt nice when you meditated. Real calm.”

For the first time since the end of yesterday’s video conference, Sam feels something from Bucky that’s not muffled and opaque: a warm sweep of something pleased and surprised, like a flash of unexpected sunlight from behind thick clouds. It’s gone as soon as Sam’s noticed it though.

“Oh. Um, I’m glad.”

“Is there—is there anything you need me to do on my end?” Sam asks, uncertain of what he can even do. Still, as the person here who doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of trauma and bad history with having his mind fucked with, Sam’s gotta offer. Maybe he could ask Wanda for some mental focus tips or whatever...

“No,” says Bucky quickly. “I’m—you’re fine, don’t worry about it.”

They wrap up the call awkwardly after that, and Sam puts down the phone, restless with the urge to do something.

He could try to find a support group meet up now, he supposes, but FRIDAY tells him there aren’t any scheduled for today. So he goes for a run instead, and tries to practice some of that mental focus Bucky seems so good at. And maybe it works, because the vague impression of Bucky’s presence grows more and more distant in Sam’s mind, like they’re no longer next door neighbors, but are just two acquaintances who live in the same neighborhood.

That should be a good thing, right? So why does Sam still feel like he’s lost something?

* * *

It only takes two support group meetings for the returned for Sam to learn that he and Bucky definitely aren’t alone in their whole weird and inexplicable phantom feelings situation.

Sam isn’t even the one to bring it up at the first meeting he goes to; a young woman tentatively asks _So, is it just me, or does anyone else constantly feel like they’ve forgotten something really important since coming back?_ At the second meeting, a staid middle-aged postal worker tells the group about how he’s been having vivid, realistic dreams every single night, all featuring the same woman, someone he’s never met before. Sam spends the next couple weeks going to a meeting a day, all over every borough of New York, and at every one, someone’s got the same kind of story to tell: a persistent sense of something like deja vu, the anxious certainty that they’ve forgotten something important, vivid dreams and rushes of feeling or sensation that aren’t their own.

Sam had half expected to get nothing more than intel out of these meetings, but hearing others’ experiences and sharing some of his own prove to be pretty damn comforting. It’s confirmation: this isn’t just Sam and Bucky, this is something more than a bizarre fluke.

He doesn’t share all of his experiences though; he holds back what had happened when he and Bucky had touched, what’s still happening, because maybe Sam has a little more knowledge than the other people in these groups, but he’s still in the same boat they are: confused, and certain he’s missing something important to him. Because through some combination of distance and time zone mismatch, and probably Bucky’s own efforts, Sam’s sense of him has gone mostly quiet, down to little more than a dull and faint awareness of another presence.

Which is good, and if Sam had anything like the same kind of Wakandan therapy provided mind skills or whatever they are, he’d have been doing the same thing too. And yet, he finds himself automatically agreeing with the people in the support groups he visits: _I feel lonely and I don’t know why_.

Steve reports similar stories from the groups he’s leading.

“It’s not everybody,” he says. “I’d say most people are still just dealing with feeling displaced and overwhelmed, but maybe three or four out of every ten people are having experiences like yours and Bucky’s.”

Natasha and FRIDAY’s trawl through the internet yields similar results, and when it’s been five weeks since the Blip, it starts to hit the news cycle. Nothing to sound the alarm over, just a steady trickle of human interest stories checking in with people who have come back, people who are sure they’re missing something or someone, but they don’t know what. Some of them have some pretty wild theories about it: they’d been ripped out of heaven, they’d been in an alternate universe, were remembering past lives, had developed psychic powers. Though, to be fair, that last theory isn’t exactly out of the question.

“So, unless this an improbably widespread delusion, this is definitely a thing, a real, actual thing that’s happening,” Sam says at their next video conference with Shuri, Okoye, and Bucky.

“It seems so,” says Shuri. “What thing it is though, I couldn’t say just yet.”

“This may be a matter for the priests and priestesses,” Okoye suggests.

Natasha tilts her head and says, “Or for a Sorcerer Supreme. I think it’s time to give Dr. Strange a call.”

* * *

Dr. Strange tells them he’ll look into it, and when Natasha presses him on a timeline, he snaps back that he’ll get to it just as soon as he’s cleared his backlog of Sorcerer Supreme duties from the last five years. _Give us a couple months,_ offers Strange’s partner Wong, so then it’s just more waiting, more gathering intel and data on the experiences of the returned as the world continues to rebuild and recover.

They settle into a holding pattern over the next couple weeks: Sam and Bucky both check in twice a week, both with each other, and with their respective medical teams, but there’s nothing to report other than that Bucky’s constant efforts to keep up some mental distance between them are taking a toll, on both of them. While there haven’t been any repeats of the nightmare incident, neither of them are exactly sleeping well. Sam’s sleep is restless and full of strange, frenetic dreams that dissipate as soon as he wakes up, and he finds that he’s snappish and easily irritated, out of sorts. Bucky grudgingly admits to having frequent headaches, and with every check in, his voice over the phone line is more and more tired and flat.

Finally, Sam ends up just telling Bucky to stop trying so damn hard to keep his distance. “Listen, I get it, you don’t want anything messing with your head, and you don’t want to, whatever, traumatize me, but c’mon, man. You can ease up a little. I can handle it, and I’m not gonna mess with you.”

“I just don’t wanna hurt you,” Bucky says, raw and honest, and shit, he really sounds exhausted, and miserable with it. Sam should’ve put a stop to this a week ago. “Done enough of that.”

“Don’t pull this martyr shit on me, Barnes,” says Sam sharply. “You know I don’t blame you for anything you did while HYDRA had a hold of you, and I sure as hell don’t blame you for what’s going on now, so don’t go hurting yourself and acting like it’s for my benefit.”

Sam’s gotten the hang of this link thing a little better by now, so he follows up his blunt words by imagining himself throwing his mental doors and windows wide open in invitation. He has half a second to feel uncomfortably, horribly exposed, like anything could hurricane through him and leave him wrecked and empty, but then Bucky sighs and the swift return of his intangible presence is no hurricane: it’s a sweet, cool breeze and lazy, late afternoon sunlight, followed by a flood of aching weariness that nearly pulls Sam under.

Bucky must get an echo of Sam’s alarm and worry, because he says, “It’s fine, I’m just tired,” his voice little more than a mumble.

“Bucky, you should’ve said something.”

Though never mind Bucky saying something, Sam should’ve known. It’s easy to forget, given how well he’s doing, but Bucky’s still recovering from some truly horrific traumas, and it can’t be easy for him to deal with working on his own healing on top of managing this new mental weirdness.

“I’m fine,” Bucky insists, like Sam isn’t being nearly swamped by secondhand mental exhaustion.

“I can absolutely tell that’s a lie. C’mon, get some rest,” Sam tells him. “I’ll feel better when you do.”

“Alright, alright,” Bucky mutters.

Only minutes after he hangs up, Sam can tell Bucky’s well and truly asleep, almost as if he were in the room with Sam and Sam could see him curled up under a blanket, could hear his steady breathing. There’s an odd comfort in going about his day with that background sense of someone else’s heavy, peaceful rest, and when it’s time for Sam to call it a night, he sleeps deep and easy for the first time in weeks.

Things are better, after that. He and Bucky both get the odd mirrored sensations from each other, and they’re still all too aware of each other, but that’s definitely preferable to the strain of maintaining distance. If what’s linking them together is some kind of line, Sam can imagine that it’s slack and easy now, ready to be wound gently in rather than pulled tight and tense to the breaking point. Sam hadn’t even realized how much that strain had been wearing on him until it eased some. He could live with this, he thinks, as the deep waters calm of Bucky’s morning meditation in Wakandan eases him into sleep at night in New York. If they’re stuck with this for a while, Sam can deal. It’s not the worst thing ever.

* * *

While they’re waiting for Dr. Strange to get back to them, they get some good news: Bucky’s international fugitive status is officially revoked. Sam’s not privy to all the political and legal maneuvering that had taken; all he knows is the upshot is Bucky’s free and clear, and classified as an official Avenger now, thanks to Steve, Natasha, and Rhodey.

There’s a whole media strategy involved too, complete with press releases and a press conference. It’s less of a shitshow than Sam had feared it would be; T’Challa and Steve both vouching for Bucky, plus the distressingly extensive documentary evidence that the Winter Soldier had been a POW and the whole framed by Zemo thing, mean most of the media coverage is sympathetic and excited.

It helps too that the world is currently feeling pretty great about superheroes. Turns out that all superheroes have to do to get the public back on their side is to have a big dramatic battle against a genocidal alien, and also return half of the entire universe back to life. Sam tries not to obsess too much over media coverage—he’s pretty sure that watching too much of your own press is a fast track to becoming a neurotic mess—but he, Steve, and Nat make a habit of watching the nightly news together to gauge the general tenor of public opinion and to keep an eye on any reporting about those who’ve returned to life.

Even if it’s sort of work-related, after years on the run, Sam appreciates the comfortable domesticity of their new routine. They no longer have to be quite so on guard, safe as they are in Avengers’ Tower, with FRIDAY’s legion of digital eyes on watch for them. So after they eat dinner—sometimes together, sometimes not—they end up in Steve’s living room, sprawled on the couches with paperwork or books or drinks or all three, watching the nightly news and talking about their days. Sometimes one of the others joins them—Wanda most often, or Banner or Rhodey—and if Sam still feels like someone’s missing, he keeps it to himself.

Tonight, their nightly news program of choice is airing a decidedly melodramatic and overwrought segment about Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, former Howling Commando turned prisoner of HYDRA turned hero who’s overcome “unimaginable tortures to become a hero once again, fighting at the side of both Captain Americas in the most momentous battle our planet has ever known.” It’s like the old Smithsonian exhibit on Cap and the Commandos, turned up to 11, and it’s far from the only similar coverage Bucky’s gotten.

Sam has, maybe, added some fuel to the fire by assuming his best noble and dignified Captain America face and making statements like, “It’s an honor to fight at Bucky’s side like Steve did all those years ago,” and “It means so much to me to have Bucky’s support,” and “I think Bucky’s showed true heroism in choosing to help people after coming back from what HYDRA did to him.” Sam knows when Bucky sees the soundbites, because he’s assailed with a wave of shy and disgruntled embarrassment, and a lot of _WILSON WHAT ARE YOU DOING???_ and _WHY???_ texts. _Just doing my part to welcome you to the team!!!_ Sam texts back.

Is this a kind of sideways revenge for those two years Sam had spent criss-crossing all of Europe looking for Bucky? Maybe. But also he does kinda mean it too. Sam firmly believes that the best trolling is _sincere_ trolling.

“Not that I’m not grateful for it, but how long do you think this honeymoon’s gonna last?” Steve asks wryly as the coverage shifts to yet another heartwarming story of _a community coming together to heal and rebuild after_ _the devastating losses and miraculous returns of the Blip. Next up, it’s America Strong_.

“Who knows, but we need to take advantage of it for more than just bringing Barnes in,” Natasha says. “This is the best opportunity we’re going to get to push for everything we need to establish the Avengers in a more stable position, so we don’t get screwed over by something like Ross’s Accords again. We’ve got a chance to rebuild the Avengers from the ground up, to do it better this time. We should run with it while we can.”

Steve smiles over at her, fond and proud. “Leadership looks good on you,” he says, and he’s right.

In this new post-Accords and post-Thanos world, Sam and Rhodey are team leads in the field, and Steve’s staying on as a kind of consultant and liaison, but Natasha’s the one who handles the big picture, and she does a damned good job of it, though like always, she shrugs off the praise.

“Just doing what needs to be done,” she says, cheeks flushed just the slightest bit pink.

“And you’re doing it better than most,” Sam tells her, and earns one of his favorite Natasha smiles, the one where she’s trying to keep her lips from curving up even as her dimples give her away.

“Learn to take a compliment, Nat,” Steve teases gently.

“Yeah, yeah,” Natasha grumbles, still pink-cheeked, and then they’re all smiling.

It’s a good moment, one of the small and ordinary yet perfectly happy moments that makes all the fighting worth it. On impulse, Sam does his best to share it with Bucky, imagining himself sending it along the line that links them like it’s a care package. He’s not sure how well it’ll work, or if it will work at all, but it must, because a warm glowing kind of feeling emanates out from Bucky’s end of the line until Sam feels downright cozy.

Maybe Sam’s life is inexplicable and weird right now, for a lot of reasons, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be good too.

* * *

After the worst and/or best of the media furor has died down some, Bucky returns to New York. When he’s on the way, Sam texts him _hope you like ticker tape parades! We’re welcoming you back with one!!!_

Bucky’s rapid response is _you better be joking or i swear to god i’m turning this plane around and going right back into cryo._

_SAM._

_SAM, TELL ME YOU’RE JOKING._

“Why’s Bucky asking me if we’re throwing a parade for him?” asks Steve a few minutes later, frowning down at his phone, before he looks up at Sam with wide and stricken eyes. “Wait, does he _want_ a parade, should I have organized one—”

Sam fights back his worst impulses and assures Steve that no, Bucky does not want a parade, or in fact any kind of special welcome, and when he and Steve meet the Wakandan talon jet on the tower roof’s landing pad, there are no balloons, streamers, or fireworks in sight. There is, however, a cake waiting downstairs in Steve’s apartment. Sam’s pretty sure Bucky won’t object to that, and if he does, more cake for Sam.

Maybe it’s psychosomatic or whatever—though really, this whole thing is psychosomatic, isn’t it—but Sam swears his mental sense of Bucky gets stronger the closer he gets, and Bucky’s excited nervousness is contagious enough that Sam’s bouncing from foot to foot, unable to stand still.

When the jet touches down and Bucky comes out, it’s like that moment on the battlefield all over again, Sam’s bones going bird-hollow, filled with a happiness so light he could surely fly if only he jumped, only now the feeling’s mirrored, doubled, as he gets Bucky’s end of it too. The line or whatever it is that links them sings into life, like a guitar string being plucked, only it’s not one pure note, it’s a whole damn harmony.

Sam’s dizzy with it until Bucky pulls back, as if he’s loosened his grip on that line between them, and the harmony falls away, discordant confusion jangling in its place. The rush of happiness unmoored from any context Sam can understand takes him right back to feeling crazy again, and Bucky’s not doing much better either judging by the unhappy _shit, is this something I can’t remember_ look on his face.

“You two alright?” Steve asks nervously as he glances between them, and the moment pops like a bubble.

“Yeah, I’m good—uh, just, that was a lot, just now,” Sam says vaguely.

Bucky nods and smiles at Steve. “It’s fine,” he says. “Caught us by surprise, is all. Nothing to worry about.”

Thankfully Steve doesn’t ask just what exactly caught Sam and Bucky by surprise like that, and Steve and Bucky do some of their mind reading via eye contact BFF thing for a bit. Apparently this satisfies Steve because he smiles back at Bucky, relieved, and pulls him into a long, tight hug. When he finally deigns to let Bucky go, it only seems natural for it to be Sam’s turn next, and it’s only when he’s got his arms around Bucky that he remembers _wait, we don’t do this_ , but it’s too late, muscle memory takes over, and anyway, Bucky’s hugging him back.

It’s a good hug, Sam thinks distantly, as that pleasant sense of harmony takes over again. Bucky’s a full body kind of hugger, doesn’t hold anything back, and he does this cute, happy sighing thing, and it’s just—a _really good_ hug, warm and safe and comfortable. Too comfortable, like they do this all the time. Except they don’t.

They break apart.

“Sorry,” Sam says. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah, no, neither did I—” Bucky cuts in, and before they can dig themselves out of this awkward hug-induced hole, Steve puts a hand on each of their shoulders.

“Do we need a group hug to make this less awkward?” Steve jokes, but that furrow of worry and confusion is back on his forehead as he glances between Sam and Bucky. 

Sam rolls with the joke and throws an arm around Steve. “What can I say, your whole hug therapy thing is contagious.”

Bucky does the same, though he still looks vaguely skittish and spooked around the eyes, and he’s doing that effortful mental distance thing again, Sam’s mental sense of him gone staticky and opaque. Sam tries to follow suit, imagining himself closing a house’s windows and doors, and he thinks it works.

The physical distance between them has let Sam avoid a lot of the strangeness of this whole situation, but it’s come roaring back now, impossible to ignore. They’ve really got to figure out just what the hell is going on.

* * *

Sam and Bucky report to the infirmary the next day for tests. Dr. Cho and Banner do yet another round of all the usual tests and examinations, first with each of them individually, in private, and then with both of them together. All throughout, the low buzz of Bucky’s anxiety thrums between them, and it doesn’t take a mysterious link to understand why, given Bucky’s history. Sam does his best to project some wordless reassurance Bucky’s way, and it seems to help. Bucky shoots him a grateful smile when they’re back in the same exam room, at any rate.

“So, you said a lot of this started with skin to skin contact, right?” asks Banner. “Let’s try a round of tests with you two touching, see if we can’t isolate any abnormalities or changes in your vitals or scans.”

“Uh, how do you want to—” starts Bucky, at the same time as Sam says, “Should we hold hands?”

“Holding hands should be sufficient,” says Dr. Cho with a reassuring smile.

So they sit together on an exam table, Sam’s left hand in Bucky’s right, and it’s yet another thing that’s simultaneously awkward and not. Rather than the loose hand clasp Sam would expect out of a doctor-mandated handholding session for science, when he and Bucky reach for each other’s hands, they end up intertwining their fingers together, a full-on _we’re a couple_ kind of grip. There’s no zinging spark this time, no flash of heat, but there is warmth, deep and steady, and Bucky’s presence in Sam’s head loses all its careful distance. _This is not how platonic bros hold hands_ , thinks part of Sam, while the other part is busy feeling too many confusing feelings about the heat of Bucky’s hand and how perfectly it fits in his.

“Is this okay?” asks Bucky, and Sam strokes Bucky’s knuckle with his thumb before he realizes what he’s doing and stops, because _wow_ , _not appropriate_ when they’re holding hands for science.

“It’s fine,” he says.

Dr. Cho and Banner take their vitals again and note the results down, set up some new scans, then ask them some questions.

“How do you feel?” asks Dr. Cho. “Physically, emotionally?”

Bucky shifts next to him, his hesitance clear, so Sam goes first. “I feel fine. Good, even,” he says, then stops, because this doesn’t seem sufficiently specific. “Kinda sleepy, maybe. We had a late night with Bucky’s welcome dinner.”

Which, despite the whole mysterious, intangible post-resurrection bond situation looming over them, had been really nice. Good food, good company, none of them actively on the run from the law…Sam wishes they could’ve gotten there without an apocalypse along the way, but all in all, for the first time in a long time, everything had felt exactly right.

“And emotionally?” prompts Banner.

“The same? I’m good. Calm, I guess. A little worried about all these tests.”

Dr. Cho notes his answer down, like it’s not vague to the point of uselessness. But Sam’s not really willing to subject his inexplicable warm and fuzzy feelings towards Bucky to the cold eye of science.

“And you, Bucky?” asks Dr. Cho.

“I’m, uh, good too, and a little worried, same as Sam,” he says. “Didn’t sleep much last night though, so I guess I’m feeling kinda jet lagged.”

“No discomfort with the physical contact?” asks Banner. “Like, is there any weird sensation in your hands, or are you emotionally uncomfortable with it…”

“It just feels warm. And, you know, nice. Holding hands is—nice,” says Sam, like some kinda robot alien. But nice is the only word he’s willing to have on the scientific record, so to speak. “You know, in general. Also Bucky’s hand, specifically. Good—good handholding action here.”

Dr. Cho ducks her head down to unsuccessfully hide a smile and Sam briefly closes his eyes in mortification. Which doesn’t stop him feeling the ripple of charmed glee from Bucky’s direction as Bucky squeezes his hand.

“Thanks,” says Bucky, and Sam can hear the smile in it. “It feels the same for me, I guess.”

“That’s good,” Banner says dryly. “Keep holding hands then, though feel free to change positions if you need to. We’ll keep monitoring for an hour or so to see if there’s any changes in your vitals or scans.”

“Anything to worry about so far?” asks Sam.

“Not that I can see,” Dr. Cho tells them. “But we still need more data and analysis. Just hang out here for an hour or so, FRIDAY can put something on for you to watch or listen to.”

“Thanks, Dr. Cho,” Sam tells her, and she leaves them with a smile.

The whole handholding situation becomes nearly immediately awkward. Sam’s hyperaware of the fact that his hand’s started to get a little sweaty, and Bucky’s grip has gone weirdly loose, like he’s worried he’s been squeezing too hard, and it’s just—awkward. Like, holding hands with your middle school crush for the first time level of awkward.

“Sorry,” mutters Bucky. “Been a while since I’ve done this.”

“Yeah, me too,” says Sam, and Bucky’s eyebrows go up in surprise. “What, what’s that look for?”

“Nothing! Just—would’ve thought a catch like you has people lining up to, uh, hold your hand. And stuff.”

The embarrassed flush rising on Bucky’s cheeks is downright cute, but sadly, it doesn’t much distract Sam from the stark and brutal truth: even if he doesn’t count his missing five years, it’s been years since Sam’s been in a handholding kind of relationship. He counts backwards in his head: he hasn’t had anything more than a few flings since getting all mixed up in this superhero business, and his last relationship had been…shit, nearly a year before the whole Project Insight mess, with Simone. Who’d been great, but she’d understandably ditched him for being half checked out of their relationship, just going through the motions. And before that—Riley.

So. Fifteen years, ten if he doesn’t count the missing ones. Shit.

And here Sam had thought he’d been doing so well, living a life, moving on, being a badass superhero.

“Sorry,” Bucky says again, looking faintly stricken. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s alright. Uh, didn’t realize it’s been so long for me, I guess.”

Bucky squeezes his hand gently, leans in towards him a little and Sam leans back, grateful for the quiet support.

“Not as long as it’s been for me, at least. But I’ve got a good excuse, on account of the whole brainwashed assassin trauma thing. What’s keeping you from holding some nice gal’s hand?”

Bucky’s earnest listening face is a potent thing, especially from this close up. “It’d be a nice gal _or_ a guy’s hand, for the record,” Sam tells him. “And—I guess it’s because I lost someone. Riley.”

Grief, it seems, has been taking up more room in Sam’s heart than he’d entirely noticed. He’s been so busy filling his life with other things—

“Must’ve been a pretty special guy,” says Bucky softly.

“Yeah. Yeah, he was,” Sam says. He blinks back the sting of tears and clears the growing lump out of his throat. “So, uh, we’ve got an hour to kill, wanna watch something?”

Thankfully, Bucky takes the change of subject gracefully, and they spend a few minutes arguing over what to watch before settling on an unobjectionably pleasant cooking show.

After twenty minutes, the show’s slow pace and the comfort of Bucky’s body heat pressed up along his side combine to make Sam drowsy enough to start nodding off. He ends up resting his head on Bucky’s shoulder and dozing until Banner and Cho come back in, and he startles back awake.

“Shit, I didn’t ruin the results by napping, did I?”

“No, you’re fine. I think we have enough data for now, the same results held steady for nearly the whole time period.”

“And? What are the results?” asks Bucky.

“Nothing bad, just the opposite, actually,” says Banner with a reassuring smile. “There’s a small but statistically significant improvement in your vital signs, and, not sure this has any clinical significance to be honest, but it is interesting: after you maintained physical contact for about 18 minutes, your heartbeats began to sync up.”

Banner throws up the results on a holographic screen, and huh, he’s right: the steady up and down pattern of their heart rate monitors started out different, the peaks and valleys mismatched, then synced up to mirror each other.

“Dr. Cho and I would like to get some more detailed scans of your brains too, see if the mirroring is duplicated there, if that’s alright.”

“What would it mean if it is?” Sam asks.

“Not sure!” Dr. Cho says cheerfully. “My current hypothesis is that your mirror neurons are in overdrive, but somehow they’re only reacting like that to each other. If we could find out what’s triggered that, how it’s persisting even when you two are apart, we might get closer to an answer about what’s going on.”

This sounds reassuringly scientific and plausible, so Sam says sure, and after some hesitation, so does Bucky.

Sam’s the only one who can get in the fMRI machine—even if he takes his prosthetic off, Bucky’s got too much metal in the port in his left shoulder and supporting the bones around it to make an MRI safe or practical—so they run that test with Sam in the machine while Bucky keeps a hand on Sam’s ankle to maintain the necessary physical contact. Despite knowing it’s coming, Sam flinches when the MRI machine begins its clanking and banging. He’s not claustrophobic or anything, but he’s not a fan of loud, explosion-like noises in close proximity to his head. It always takes him back to flying while dodging RPGs and gunfire, to losing Riley.

“Stay still please,” Banner calls out, and Sam rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah!” The machine clangs again and Sam flinches. “Fuck, I hate that noise.”

“I know,” says Bucky, and his thumb rubs soothing, small circles on Sam’s ankle. “Just a few more minutes.”

Some of that meditation calm feeling comes through their link, and Sam takes a deep breath, wonders if their heartbeats are syncing up again. It’s easier to bear the noises after that.

The PET scan is next, and they can both do that, though it clearly makes Bucky nervous. Sam holds tight to his hand and keeps up a steady patter of nonsense chatter, which seems to help.

After one look at the magnetoencephalography machine though, Sam thinks _no way in hell am I letting Bucky get in that_. Because maybe it doesn’t look a damn thing like HYDRA’s nightmarish mind-wiping chair, but it’s still a chair with an imposingly huge and alarming looking white tube that’s meant to go over your head, like some kind of alien, sci fi version of a perm chair. Bucky actually goddamn stops breathing for a few seconds when he sees it, every part of him going stiff and still. Worse even than that is the sudden, total blankness of his mental presence—not an absence, but an icy wall.

“Hell no,” Sam says, flat and final. “Bucky’s not getting in that. I’ll do the test, whatever, but not him.”

“It’s safe,” Banner reassures them. “There won’t be any issues with Barnes’ prosthetic, since the magnetic field is limited to the head.”

“Uh, that’s not the problem here! I think it’s pretty damn obvious why this isn’t a good idea!”

“It’s fine,” says Bucky abruptly. And when Sam stares at him, he adds, “I can handle it,” as if Sam isn’t painfully aware of the fact that he’s halfway to dissociating at this very moment.

“We don’t have to do this,” Sam tells him, and Bucky shakes his head. Sam’s really not a fan of how his expression has gone hard and perilously close to absent.

“Yeah, we do. If we want to figure out what’s going on, we do. What if this is the scan that’ll tell us what’s really wrong?”

“And what if we have enough data already? We can just wait on Dr. Strange, see what he tells us.”

“How long can we afford to wait? This whole mental link thing doesn’t seem dangerous, sure, but if it’s doing something to you, if it’s hurting you, we have to know. I can handle some bad memories.”

Sam opens his mouth to argue with him some more, but Bucky’s face shuts down even more, and he realizes it would be pointless, and an asshole move besides, to draw this out and argue with Bucky about his own limits. They can argue, uselessly, or they can get this over with, the faster the better.

“Fine, but I’m going first,” Sam says, and sits in the chair before Bucky or Banner can say anything.

Banner’s finally caught on, and apparently decides that exhaustively explaining how the MEG works will help, not that Bucky’s listening. The grip of his hand in Sam’s is loose, and he’s looking down at their joined hands, stare empty and unfocused. By the time it’s Bucky’s turn in the MEG, he’s fully checked out, gone somewhere far and deep enough that all of Sam’s tugs on the line that’s supposed to connect them go unanswered. But he still gets in the chair, and the sight makes Sam queasy and cold.

“Bucky. Bucky, hey, you with me? Do you want Steve here? Do you want to stop?” Bucky shakes his head and closes his eyes. Sam glares up at Banner. “I swear, this had better be worth it.”

When the machine turns on, Bucky’s hold on Sam’s hand gets tight, tight enough to almost hurt, but Sam doesn’t care, he’s just relieved at this sign of life.

“It’s fine, we’re fine,” Sam tells him. “Not much longer now. You’re doing real good.”

He keeps talking, hoping some of it’s getting through to Bucky, and finally the damned test is over and he can pull a horribly unresisting Bucky out of the damned chair. Jesus, he hates the vacant look on his face, hates the wall Bucky’s keeping up.

“We’re done here,” Sam says, and Banner grimaces and nods.

“Yeah, of course. I’ll let you know what the results tell us.”

* * *

On something like instinct, Sam takes a still silent Bucky up to the Tower’s rooftop garden. It’s a too-well manicured green space, landscaped with almost aggressively good taste, but it is pretty and peaceful. After a few minutes sitting on a bench in the sunshine, the sounds of the city below them distant and faint, Bucky sucks in a deep, shuddering breath, and the wall of icy blankness falls away, leaving a dark rip current in its place. Sam can guess what’s in those dark mental waters—other labs, other, worse chairs, pain and screams—and just as he wonders if he can stand firm under the rush, it passes.

“Sorry,” says Bucky, and lets go of Sam’s hand. Sam hadn’t even realized they were still holding onto each other.

“Nothing to apologize for. You did great,” says Sam, stilted and inadequate. “Hope the answers we get are worth all that. Do you—do you need some company, or do you want me to call someone for you—”

“I’m alright. You don’t have to—” Bucky stops, as if the words are choking him. He shakes his head. “I’ll be alright. You don’t need to stick around. You’re not a fan of meditating, as I recall.”

“Yeah, no,” Sam says, and stands up, not quite ready to leave yet. “See you at dinner?”

Bucky tilts his head up towards him, an oddly bitter half-smile curving his lips. A ray of sunlight hits his eyes at just the right angle to turn them into a faithful mirror of the sky above them, exactly that blue and deep, the kind of blue that makes Sam want to throw himself into the sky. Sam’s breath catches with something too sweet to be pain.

“Sure,” Bucky says.

Sam heads down to the Tower gym to do his own version of meditating. He hits the treadmill and runs five miles, then goes a few rounds with the punching bag, then moves onto pull-ups, and only then does Bucky’s calm finally reach him in one cool, clear wave.

* * *

The tests don’t really lead to any answers. Dr. Cho and Banner conclude that there’s definitely something happening on a physical and biological level, something about mirror neurons and biofeedback, but that it’s a symptom or result of something else that they haven’t been able to isolate. They pass the test results and reports on to Dr. Strange, and keep waiting.

While they wait, a steady trickle of stories and reports come in from other people who were returned after the Blip. The media are catching on now, and they’re soliciting more first-hand accounts, collecting more stories, until they become featured segments on the nightly news that Sam, Steve, Natasha and Bucky watch together. More and more people begin reporting the same kind of symptoms as Sam and Bucky, a handful of them even saying they’ve had the whole lightning flash feeling after touching someone, although unlike Sam and Bucky, these are people who had been strangers to each other.

 _It was like—love at first sight, you know?_ says a man on the nightly news, almost dazed, a big smile on his face, the expression almost surprised, like he’s not yet ready to believe his own happiness. _I always thought that was bullshit, but it’s real, I feel it here, in my heart. I love her._

Another woman says _I touched her and I knew: she’s my soulmate._ Her partner nods, rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder, saying _It was just this instant connection. I know it’s weird, but I feel like maybe—maybe our souls found each other when we were, like, dead, you know? And now we’re back, and it’s just—it’s amazing, a miracle on top of a miracle._

 _I keep dreaming of this woman_ , says a young and desperate looking guy, as he holds up a rough sketch of a woman with curly hair. _And I just—I gotta find her. I wake up, and I miss her, and I just—I need to know why. If you know her, if it’s you, can you—_

Sam closes his eyes to keep himself from looking at Bucky. Not that it helps. He can tell how Bucky’s feeling anyway, a fluttering and staticky kind of distress and confusion traveling across that invisible thing that links them together.

“Is any of this what it’s been like for you two?” asks Natasha, careless and casual, and when Sam opens his eyes again, she’s looking at him and Bucky where they’re setting next to each other on the sectional. There’s a totally normal six inches of space between them, and yet Sam feels like he should scoot away.

“I think we can safely rule out love at first sight,” Sam says.

“And soulmates?” scoffs Bucky. “Come on. Something’s going on, sure, but there’s got to be an, I don’t know, rational explanation,” he says, shifting restlessly on the couch beside Sam, and Sam nods in agreement.

It’s not like this mysterious connection situation they have going means that he and Bucky are _in love_. Sam’s pretty sure he’d know if he was in love with Bucky. He’s _been_ in love, he knows what it feels like, and whatever’s going on with him and Bucky, it’s not that. It’s just a consequence of the whole mirror neurons and biofeedback thing, plus how they’re all up in each other’s mental business. Maybe for these other people on the news, the best way they can translate all the weird shit is to assume that it’s some kind of love at first sight thing, but Sam and Bucky know better.

Steve smiles over at Bucky, crooked and wry. “Yeah, of course. But we’re living in some pretty strange times, Buck. Nowadays rational explanations include magic and alien trees that talk and unimaginably powerful gems from the dawn of the universe.”

“And consider that we’ve asked a guy with the job title of Sorcerer Supreme for help,” adds Natasha.

“Speaking of, he’s taking his sweet time getting back to us,” grumbles Sam. “He give us any kind of ETA on a debrief about all this?”

“Wong says the mystical realms are almost back in alignment, whatever that means, so it shouldn’t take much longer,” Natasha says, and a few days later, Strange finally lets them know that he has some answers for them.


	3. Chapter 3

Sam’s life is pretty goddamn weird nowadays, but he’ll never get over the weirdness of attending meetings with the likes of a guy whose actual job title is Sorcerer Supreme. Even alien space kings are somehow less weird than this. Like, Sam knows that red cloak thing Dr. Strange wears is actually sort of a weapon, but he still feels like he’s walked into a costume party whenever he sees the guy.

“So, what’s the verdict, Doc? Are we all going crazy or what?” asks Sam, after all the introductory debriefing is dispensed with.

Shit, maybe not the best way to put it. He’s Captain America now, he should probably shoot for something closer to Steve’s gravitas, or at least some more professionalism. This is an official Avengers meeting, after all, nearly the whole team present and accounted for. Steve doesn’t seem to notice or care about Sam’s casual tone at least; the deep vertical furrow of worry is back on his forehead, and he’s totally focused on Dr. Strange.

“I cannot speak to your mental state, Mr. Wilson, but the sensations many of the returned are feeling are not due to any illness, mental or otherwise. They are a consequence of our return to life.”

“Did I fuck something up when I used the Stones?” asks Banner. “I was so focused on making sure everyone came back safely, but maybe I—”

Steve shakes his head, and Natasha reaches over and puts a hand on Banner’s forearm. “Hey, no, don’t start with that,” she says. “You pulled off a miracle, Bruce. You brought back half the universe. If anything else has gone wrong, we’ll handle it, but don’t blame yourself.”

“Natasha’s right, this isn’t on you, Bruce,” adds Rhodey, and everyone else murmurs their agreement.

Banner nods, still clenching and unclenching his uninjured fist. Part of Sam still feels like he should be diving for cover. A green Bruce Banner is usually a sign that shit’s about to go sideways. But this new melding of Banner and the Hulk just looks the normal amount of worried and upset, so he’s probably not about to flip the conference table over and Hulk smash them all.

“Indeed, this is no fault of yours, Dr. Banner. This is difficult to explain, but—those of us who were taken in the Decimation were not, strictly speaking, dead.”

“What?” asks Steve sharply.

“Since when does being turned to literal dust not count as being dead?” demands Sam.

Dr. Strange grimaces. “The Infinity Stones do not always accomplish what their bearer asks them to accomplish in ways that are obvious. Thanos used the _Soul Stone_ to achieve his genocide. The other Stones powered it for this task, but it was the Soul Stone that achieved it. And that means that the manner in which half the universe was taken was not so straightforward as simply taking their lives. Dr. Banner, I believe, understands this.”

“Yeah,” said Banner, nodding slowly. “I didn’t get the sense I was—you know, _making_ life when I used the Stones to bring everyone back.”

“You were not. The easiest way to describe it is—” Dr. Strange paused, steepled his fingers. “In using the Soul Stone, Thanos severed half of the universe’s souls from their physical bodies, and transferred those souls to the Stone’s own realm. From the outside, this resulted in the Decimation all of you who were left behind saw.”

“And from the inside?” asks Bucky. He’s frowning hard, and Sam knows—the same way he always knows now—that it’s not because he’s upset, but because he’s trying to remember something.

“From the inside, it would have been a sort of—purgatory, or limbo, for our souls. We were not alive, not quite, but we still existed.”

“We just don’t remember it,” says Bucky, his voice so quiet Sam only barely hears him.

Goosebumps break out all along the back of Sam’s neck and his arms. It’s been disorienting enough to end up five years in the future when only seconds seemed to have passed for him. To learn now that he’s actually _lost_ five years, that he’s forgotten them—Sam’s own panic echoes, doubles, before it abruptly collapses into a deliberate calm that can’t be him, because Sam’s still low-key freaking out. He glances at Bucky, who’s resting his forehead on his clasped fists, and breathing in and out with deliberate slowness. Sam’s own lungs follow Bucky’s lead, and some of the panic dissipates.

“Our minds don’t, no. But our souls do.” Dr. Strange’s mouth goes pinched, like he’s none too happy about what he just said either.

“Souls,” repeats Dr. Banner, and sits back with a disbelieving little laugh. “That’s not—what even _is_ a soul, we can’t _measure_ a soul—”

Dr. Strange sighs. “I was a neurosurgeon before I was ever a sorcerer, Dr. Banner, I assure you, I’m not a big fan of being reduced to talking about such an intangible concept as the soul. And yet. I myself have traveled beyond and without my body, and it’s the simplest way to describe the state of those of us who were victims of the Decimation.”

“Well, this is all, uh, metaphysically interesting, I guess?” says Lang. “But what’s it got to do with all the weird stuff people are reporting feeling? The voices and the phantom sensations and dreams and things?”

“In that other space of the Soul Stone, we were all interacting without the mediation of bodies, soul to soul,” says Strange slowly. Something deep inside Sam aches, and he presses his hand against his chest. “It’s likely bonds were formed during those five years.”

Wanda let out a quiet gasp of, “Oh. Of course. That’s why I couldn’t quite sense what was happening in Sam’s mind. It wasn’t happening in your mind at all, but in your _soul_.”

“So, what, we’ve still got some kind of link to everyone we touched while technically disembodied?” Sam shakes his head. “That’s crazy. It’s got to fade or something, right?”

“It wouldn’t be everyone we touched or interacted with in the Soul Stone,” says Wanda. “It would take more than that.” She looks at Dr. Strange. “Wouldn’t it?”

Dr. Strange nods. “For such a connection to persist now, for it to have such a physical effect on you, it would take considerably more than touch.”

“Uh, are you talking about, you know—sex?” asks Steve, blushing.

Sam rolls his eyes. For a man who Sam knows for a fact is no virgin, Steve gets awfully red-faced and prudish when the topic of sex comes up.

“Maybe. More likely though is that in five years, people developed new bonds and relationships, or strengthened old ones. People grew closer, fell in love, perhaps. And upon being returned to the physical world, in their physical bodies…some such bonds and feelings have remained.”

Now everyone at the conference table but Dr. Strange looks at Sam and Bucky.

Dr. Strange continues, “The feelings of deja vu will likely persist. But it is unlikely that the average person without any magical or mental training will recover any concrete memories of the last five years, given that memory is a physical process tied to the structure of the brain. Consider it a conversion error, of sorts. The brain can’t entirely translate such experiences. Perhaps, if Dr. Banner had known exactly what the Soul Stone had done…” Dr. Strange shrugs. “But he didn’t, and amnesia is a small price to pay for saving so many lives.”

“What about the—the other stuff,” asks Bucky quietly. “Because take it from someone with actual amnesia, this isn’t all like that. I felt it, when Sam got hurt during training. I was in Wakanda and I felt it.”

Sam meets Bucky’s eyes from across the conference table, and it feels—Sam’s not sure how to translate how it feels. Like the adrenaline rush of flying, maybe, only more calm than that. It’s like his lungs have opened up to take in more air, it’s like the room’s gotten brighter, the colors deeper and more vivid, it’s like he’s only just learned what the air feels like on his bare skin. God, the look on Bucky’s face, Sam wants to cover it up, make sure no one else sees, because that openness, that’s not for the team, it’s for—what the hell is he thinking. Sam’s focus breaks, and he looks away, then shivers with the sudden absence of all that strange sensation.

“And I knew when Bucky had a bad nightmare,” he manages to say. “I always feel it when he’s meditating, I always feel—” _I always feel him_ is too big a thing to say, even if it is the truth.

“I think,” says Dr. Strange, his voice gentle now rather than lecturing, “You two must have formed a very strong bond indeed.”

“And that’s the cause of the mirroring, the biofeedback?” asks Banner, sitting back in his chair with a look of disbelief.

Dr. Strange nods. “A physical manifestation of a metaphysical bond, yes.”

“Is it—dangerous? Or, is there something we should be doing for them, or for anyone else who’s affected?” asks Steve.

“It’s not dangerous, no. Psychologically distressing for some, perhaps, but I doubt there’s any real danger. Many of the effects may well fade with time, particularly if the bond is not consummated, so to speak, by the parties meeting again. I rather doubt it, however. A bond between souls is a strong thing, once formed.”

Sam’s not sure that’s a particularly satisfying or comforting answer. Bucky agrees, apparently, because he’s back to wringing his hands. The urge to reach across the table and take Bucky’s hands in his is so strong, he has to actually focus to keep himself from doing it. Neither of them needs the distraction of skin-to-skin contact right now.

“Is there—is there any way to, I don’t know, stop it, or turn it off?” asks Bucky.

Dr. Strange frowns. “Not my area, sorry, and I wouldn’t like to try. Perhaps Ms. Maximoff could?”

“I wouldn’t,” says Wanda. “To manipulate souls, to take away someone’s love? I would never, I don’t even think I could.”

“Who said anything about love?” snaps Sam, and Bucky flinches. Sam gets a disorienting reflection of hurt and horror for a moment, then it’s like Bucky’s slammed his mental door shut in Sam’s face, and there’s nothing. Sam’s really beginning to hate that feeling. “Fuck, I didn’t mean—”

“No one deserves to have some kinda unbreakable goddamn link to the hell in my head,” says Bucky, face pale as he pushes his chair back. “I’ll tell T’Challa and Shuri what you told us, Dr. Strange, see what the Wakandan elders have to say.”

Bucky’s out the door before Sam or anyone else can say anything to stop him. Sam’s already on his feet to go after him, to—Sam doesn’t even know what, he just knows he can’t let Bucky leave with that hurt echoing between them, but Steve stops him with an apologetic glance.

“Let me talk to him, Sam,” he says, and follows Bucky.

Banner pulls off his glasses with a sigh, and rubs at his forehead. “Psychologically distressing, you said?”

Sam clamps down on a too-hysterical laugh. Yeah, psychologically distressing sounds about right. And really fucking emotionally compromised. _Five years_ , five fucking years and who knows what had happened to him, to them, except apparently he and Bucky had formed a _very strong bond_ somehow. He wishes he could believe they’d just had a lot of no strings attached sex to pass the time, but fuckbuddies don’t lace their fingers together when they hold hands, don’t rub tender circles on each other’s ankles to distract them when they’re upset.

None of that’s a symptom of any kind of condition.

He mentally pokes at that weird, internal Bucky-sense, the bond or line of light or whatever the hell it is, and comes up against that closed door feeling again. He can tell Bucky’s there, but that’s all. After weeks of the background, white noise hum of someone else’s feelings at the edge of his perception, the return of silence has him off-balance, like he’s no longer on solid ground.

“Are you okay?” Wanda asks him. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything about—”

He tries to smile at her and says, “Hey, no, it’s fine, I’m fine. This is all just—a lot.” Natasha reaches over to take his hand and give it a squeeze, and he holds onto her small, calloused hand.

“We already knew the whole planet could use some therapy,” says Natasha with a wry smile. “So what next? Press conference? People deserve to know what’s going on, no matter how weird it sounds.”

Dr. Strange makes a face like someone’s just presented him with a pile of dog shit. “I don’t do press conferences. Or therapy. I will be in touch if I find there are any more serious consequences to undoing the Decimation.”

With one rapid gesture of his hands, Strange summons up a glowing portal, and then he’s gone. Lang squints at the portal as it blinks out.

“Do you think he still, like, just walks through doors ever? Or does he just—” Lang attempts a wild, sloppy imitation of Dr. Strange’s magic jazz hands. “Every time?”

Wanda snorts. “So unnecessarily flashy,” she mutters.

“Right. So, I can handle the press conference,” says Banner. “I’m the one who used the Stones to bring everyone back, I should be the one to tell everyone about some of the side effects.”

“And I can be the one to tell people it’s nothing to worry about, or be scared of,” Sam says. Natasha’s eyebrows go up. “What, it isn’t! My— _our_ —interpersonal, trauma shit aside, this isn’t, you know, a big deal. As far as side effects to being resurrected go, I think we can all handle some weird feelings.”

“I’ll handle the government, I guess. That’s gonna be a fun set of briefings,” Rhodey says with a grimace.

“Alright, let’s get something drafted up that both Rhodey and Banner can use, and I’ll get the ball rolling on contacting the media,” says Natasha.

As they all file out of the conference room, Lang gives Sam a few comforting pats on the shoulder.

“I’m sure you two crazy kids will work things out,” he says, and Sam sighs, doesn’t bother denying that there’s something to even work out.

“Thanks, Tic Tac.”

* * *

Five years. Five years of Sam’s life—sort of—that he’s missing and that he’ll likely never remember or get back, five years where anything could have happened, including, apparently, him and Bucky—him and Bucky being together. Him and Bucky forming a bond, because they had—

Sam shakes his head, unwilling to finish the thought, and keeps pacing the rooftop landing pad where a quinjet’s already waiting. If Bucky’s really going back to Wakanda, then Sam’s just going to have to intercept him before he leaves. No way in hell is Sam letting him go anywhere before they hash this out at least a little bit.

He tests his link to Bucky again, and comes up against a firmly closed door, just like he has every time he’s tried since the meeting with Strange ended. This had been strange enough when Sam had thought it was some kind of mental link. Knowing now that it’s their _souls_ —shit. Maybe Bucky’s right to keep up some kind of boundary.

When Bucky gets to the landing pad, a duffel bag on his shoulder and a forbiddingly closed off expression on his face, Sam steps in front of him to block his path to the jet.

“You can’t just have a video conference to talk to T’Challa and Shuri, you gotta fly all the way to Wakanda?”

“This isn’t a video conference kind of conversation, T’Challa’s called a council meeting,” Bucky says, not meeting Sam’s eyes. “And I gotta talk to Thandiwe.”

“Okay, I hear you,” says Sam. He’s honestly relieved that Bucky’s planning to talk to his therapist. At least one of them is going to get some non-sorcerer input on this situation. “But _we_ gotta talk too.”

Bucky’s jaw takes on a stubborn, furious tilt. “About what? The five years we’re never gonna remember? About this—this bond neither of us ever asked for? There’s nothing to talk about, Sam.”

Maybe they haven’t asked for this, no, but they’re living with the proof that some other version of them had chosen each other some time in the last five years. But maybe Bucky’s right, maybe there’s nothing to talk about. At least, there’s no conversation that Sam’s ready to have about all this just yet. _You two must have formed a very strong bond indeed_ , Strange had said. Well, what fucking good is knowing that if they’re never going to know how or why?

“I just—I don’t think I handled things so great, in that meeting, and I wanted to check in with you. You seemed upset,” Sam says carefully, then winces. He’s using his damn counselor voice.

“It’s fine, I’m fine.”

The stiff set of Bucky’s shoulders says otherwise. Sam’s caught between the opposing urges to let him go and make him stay, and that has to be dusted Sam talking, because Sam right now has no idea what he’ll do with Bucky if he does stay.

So he says, “Right. Okay, good.”

Bucky’s mouth twists into a grimace, and he exhales, fast and frustrated. “And you? Are you okay, I mean.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Sam says.

A stilted, choking silence rises up between them, pressing heavy with the weight of all the things they don’t know how to acknowledge or say. Sam should reassure Bucky, tell him they can handle this exactly the same way they’ve been handling it, that Sam’s okay with this bond between them. But that would be a lie, and they’d both know it. Sam’s not okay with this, not yet anyway.

“I have to go, if I’m gonna make it in time for the council meeting,” says Bucky, and Sam steps aside to let him get to the quinjet.

He thinks of those people on the news reports, how happy and certain they’d been: _it’s love at first sight, she’s my soulmate_. He thinks of fairy tale love and cheesy romcom meet-cutes, and just how damn far what’s happening between Sam and Bucky right now is from either of those things.

“Are you coming back?” asks Sam when Bucky walks past him.

Bucky stops, goes still. “I don’t know. Maybe—maybe this thing will fade, go away, if we stay apart for long enough.”

“You want it to fade,” Sam echoes.

It’s the reasonable thing to do, Sam supposes, the safest.And yet a cold hollowness empties him out, and he’s suddenly keenly aware of the way Bucky has hidden himself away, no part of him discernible to that odd internal sense that is, apparently, Sam’s soul. It shouldn’t matter. Sam’s lived nearly his whole life without that sense, there’s no reason to miss it now that it’s gone.

Bucky looks over his shoulder at Sam, his pale eyes an unreadable kind of gray that leaves Sam about as lost as flying through fog. “Don’t you?” he asks.

Sam tamps down a shiver and crosses his arms. “I—I don’t know.”

All Sam knows is that he doesn’t like this empty feeling. All he knows is that he’s missing five years. What he doesn’t know, what he can’t even begin to get a handle on, is what the hell to think or feel about Bucky right now.

Sam’s answer doesn’t surprise Bucky, who just nods. “Tell Steve I’ll call him after the meeting,” he says, and then he gets in the cockpit and he’s gone.

* * *

The press conference goes about as well as can be expected. Sam pulls out his best, most soothing counselor voice for it, and it seems to do the trick, or maybe it’s just that people think this is the least weird part of the last couple of months. It helps too that Banner says a lot of reassuringly scientific things and handles most of the reporters’ questions. Sam still has to answer some of them though, and unfortunately for him, they’re exactly the questions he’d prefer not to answer at all.

“Mr. Wilson, do you know who you’ve formed a bond with? Are you actively looking for them?”

“I know who it is, yeah, and I know where they are. I’d prefer to keep that information private at this time though.”

“Was it love at first sight, like others who have been affected by this have been reporting?”

Sam smiles, the shiny Captain America smile that doesn’t give anything away. “I don’t know about that, it was definitely something. We’re working through it, figuring things out as we go. This is a pretty unexpected situation, and I know it’s confusing for a lot of us, but we just have to be patient and thoughtful as we all continue to recover from the Decimation.”

“ _Are_ you working through it?” asks Natasha, as they take the elevator back up to the Avengers command center.

“Sure. I’m working, Bucky’s working, and we’re trying to figure things out.”

“On separate continents. Without talking to each other,” says Natasha in that neutral tone of hers that always makes Sam question all his life choices.

“There’s nothing to talk about.” Natasha’s eyebrows go up in disbelief. “What, there isn’t! Neither of us remembers anything about the last five years, and we probably never will.”

“Sure, but I’m guessing Barnes of all people knows that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

Sam swallows hard and keeps his eyes on the elevator doors. Fuck this tower and its stupid number of floors, when is this damned elevator ride gonna be over. Natasha sighs and puts a hand on his arm, and he turns to look down at her. If she were just needling at him, poking to get a reaction that would tell her something, he’d tell her to mind her own damn business, but there’s genuine, searching concern in her eyes.

“Sam. Was Strange wrong, about you two forming a very strong bond? Are you upset because you don’t actually feel anything for Barnes? Because if this is just, you know, psychologically distressing or whatever for both of you and nothing else, then I’m sure we can find a way to fix it.”

He shrugs, rubs at his chest. He’s getting used to the walled off feeling, finds it easier and easier to keep that mental/soul sense shut off. Maybe it’s easy in the way not using a broken limb is easy—a jolt of dull pain reminds him why using it would be a bad idea—but it’s still easy, it’s doable. Maybe this bond really will fade if he and Bucky don’t use it, don’t acknowledge it.

“I don’t know,” he tells Natasha. “I care about him, you know, as a teammate, don’t get me wrong, but—I just don’t know.”

* * *

Over the next week, Sam stays busy. His days are packed full of training with Steve as he teaches Sam how to use the shield, Avengers’ duties, and continuing to work on post-Decimation recovery efforts. His nights though—his nights are too damn empty, give him too much time to think, and too often, he thinks of what Natasha had said. _Barnes of all people knows that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen._ Five years worth of memories and experiences, gone.

What had those five years in the Soul Stone been like? He and Bucky had gotten to know each other, that much is obvious.They’d developed a friendship, at the least. But Sam’s friends with Steve, and he’s friends with Natasha, and though he loves them both dearly, would die to keep them safe and happy, he’s never felt about them the way he felt that moment on the battlefield, when he’d first seen Bucky again.

He has felt like that before though. It’s just been so long that the memory’s faded, almost without Sam noticing. It was a lot like the way Sam used to feel with Riley, when the thrill of flight had been inextricable from the thrill of Riley, when the sight of Riley’s dumb flashy landings had made laughter and joy and relief bubble up in Sam’s chest every damn time.

But Bucky’s not Riley, and Sam’s not interested in replacing Riley.

When he can’t sleep, he takes to trawling through the half-dozen apps and websites that have popped up purporting to help connect the returned with the people they’d met in the Soul Stone during the Blip. It’s mostly just like the vague, woo-woo version of the old Craigslist Missed Connections classifieds. Most people haven’t got anything to go on other than an amorphous feeling, maybe a few instances of shared phantom sensation, and they’re just throwing their names and photos out there in the faint hope of finding a match.

Some people though, have a little more to go on.

 _I think your name is Julio. That’s the first name in my head every time I wake up, at any rate, so I think it must be you I’m homesick for_ , posts Melissa from Canada.

Rob from Scotland writes: _You have long black hair and you do this cute snorting thing when you laugh. What a dumb, useless thing to remember, but I swear, I can hear it, like you’re in the room with me, and it makes me so fuckin happy, that little snort. It’s the best sound I’ve never actually heard. I’ve never been in love, but I think this is it._

Lee in Chicago’s message makes Sam laugh: _Did you stub your left toe real bad last week? Cuz girl/boy/neither/both, i really felt that._ _Also I don’t even know who you are and I miss you. How wild is that?_

What message would Sam have written, if he hadn’t known it was Bucky on the other end of this connection? Would he have been as sure as some of these other people are that this is love?

He presses a hand against his chest, like the gesture will ease the sense of strained emptiness that he knows is really buried somewhere deeper than muscle and bone. It’ll pass, Sam’s sure.

* * *

It doesn’t pass.

* * *

One sleepless night, listlessly scrolling through Netflix, he sees a dumb sci fi movie about giant robots punching monsters and thinks _Bucky would love this shit_. Because of course he just magically knows Bucky’s terrible taste in movies, and of course he knows that Bucky would spend the whole movie whining about how disappointing it is that the future doesn’t have cool giant robots, and no, War Machine doesn’t count, that’s just Rhodey in a normal-sized robot suit, _Sam_.

On a restless Sunday morning, after a too-long run, Sam decides to stress bake his feelings away, and finds himself automatically making three different batches of sugar cookies, each recipe progressively fussier and more involved. Steve eats a full dozen of them all on his own.

“Oh wow, these are great, Sam. You should save some for Bucky, sugar cookies are his favorite.”

“I know,” says Sam absently, and boxes some up for him to do just that, like Bucky’s coming back soon. But he’s not. “You can, uh, take some with you when you visit him next week,” he adds, and turns back to the oven before he can get the full force of Steve’s sad and worried look.

After gingerly asking if staying apart was really the best call for dealing with this whole bond situation, and getting a flat and firm _yes_ from Sam and presumably Bucky too, Steve hasn’t brought it up since, but right now Sam just knows Steve’s awfully close to bringing it up again and Sam can’t deal with that right now, he just can’t.

Except all Steve says is, “Thanks, Sam. That’s real kind of you,” in a too-soft, too careful tone of voice.

When Sam jerks off in the shower one morning, he imagines someone else’s hand on his cock, pale and slim-fingered, thinks of an intense and searing kiss with too much specificity for it to be any kind of fantasy, thinks of a pair of blue eyes focused on him, intent and adoring, and when he comes, it’s to the thought of a familiar voice saying _please_ , saying his name, so rough and low and sincere that he thinks he’d do anything to hear it again, and for the first time in a long time, it’s not Riley’s voice. The straining ache inside of him eases for a few seconds, the walls coming down for just a moment, and that feels about ten times better than the orgasm, like the first breath of fresh air after weeks spent underground, or the purity of a breeze in an untouched forest. It’s exactly that sweet and gentle, that perfectly overwhelming.

And then it’s gone again, and it’s all Sam can do not to double over in the shower and cry.

* * *

He holds out for another few days after that, before he decides, fuck it.

 _Come back_ , he texts Bucky.

Then he tries to meditate, tries to consciously reach for his bond with Bucky, that line of connection that’s been slack and silent, and he _yanks_ , hard and vicious with the force of how goddamn sick of this he is.

Awkwardly dealing with this shit together has got to be better than miserably ignoring it while they’re apart.

* * *

Bucky comes back the next day. He shows up in Steve’s apartment just after breakfast, with deep and dark circles under his eyes, the sharp and handsome angles of his face gone harsh with unhappiness, his hair frazzled and tousled like he’s been running nervous hands through it. He looks like shit, basically, and still, Sam’s soul is ready to soar at the sight of him. The only thing keeping him on solid ground is the fact that Bucky’s still got that wall up, and nope, Sam’s over that. It’s clearly not doing any damn good, for either of them, so he focuses just like he had yesterday, and pulls, gentler than he had before.

“Sam,” says Bucky, pained and hoarse as he takes a few stumbling steps forward, like Sam’s really tugging on a physical thing that’s tying them together.

“Can you just—drop it, Bucky, please. This whole bond thing isn’t fading, obviously, so there’s no damn reason for us to keep making ourselves miserable by keeping up these damn walls.”

Sam takes careful, slow steps towards Bucky, feeling an awful lot like he’s coaxing some hurt and scared animal towards safety.

Bucky shakes his head. “This is about our _souls_ , Sam, and mine’s—mine’s a fucking mess. It’s—it’s too much, you can’t—”

“Your soul doesn’t feel like a mess to me, so drop the self-sacrificing bullshit. This wasn’t too much before, and it won’t be now,” says Sam, and tries his best to project certainty, when he feels anything but. Before, they’d thought they had some kind of mental link going. Now they know it’s more than that, deeper, and if Sam thinks about it too hard, it _does_ feel like too much, too fast. And yet, the alternative of blocking this bond and ignoring it demonstrably sucks. “We’ll figure something out, okay? We can handle it. Just—just stop running and hiding, man. I’ve spent too many damn years trying to find you.”

He means those years spent chasing the Winter Soldier’s ghost after Insight, but as Bucky finally opens up again, a careful kind of unfolding, Sam wonders if maybe he’s been trying to find this for a lot longer than that. A propulsive rush of rightness and relief hits Sam, like the first time the EXO-7 Falcon jetpack had lifted him into the air: exactly that perfect, and that terrifyingly exhilarating.

 _Well, shit_ , thinks Sam. Maybe this _is_ love. Unanchored to any memories, contextless, but love all the same. Sam swallows hard, past the lump in his throat that could be laughter or tears, and wills his heart to stop pounding like it’s trying to make an escape from his ribcage.

“Is this—is this okay,” asks Bucky, taking another hesitant step forwards, letting a little more of himself bloom open into the bond.

He’s not hiding any more, but he’s still holding himself distant, keeping plenty of slack in the line. Sam tries to do the same. Even so, Sam can feel Bucky’s worry and exhaustion and relief and fear shiver down along the bond, the usual sweet deep waters sensation of Bucky’s soul gone turbulent and unsettled. But their separation has been a kind of desert, and the sight of any water is a knee-weakening relief.

“It’s just fine,” Sam tells him, and when he opens his arms on instinct, Bucky steps into them with a shuddering sigh. “So, this whole pseudo-amnesia thing is some bullshit, Bucky. Is it always like this? Feeling things and not knowing why? Knowing things without knowing how? Because that’s been the whole last few weeks for me and I’m not a fan.”

Bucky laughs, the sound a little watery. “Yeah, it is, sorry,” he says. “This is less confusing though, I guess. And it’s all—it’s mostly good stuff, at least. For me anyway.” They’re well past any kind of plausibly deniable bro hug, but neither Sam nor Bucky make any move to separate. Bucky rests his head on Sam’s shoulder, weary uncertainty rippling out from him, as he says, “What’re we gonna do, Sam.“

“I don’t know,” Sam tells him.

* * *

“You’re overthinking it,” Natasha tells them over dinner that night. “Look at all these other people finding their Soul Stone soulmates or whatever, they’re just getting to know each other and giving it a shot. It doesn’t have to be a whole big thing.”

“You make it sound like we’re trying out internet dating or something,” complains Sam. “This is about our _souls_ , Nat. Our literal, actual souls are apparently connected. I feel like you aren’t fully understanding how goddamn wild that is.”

Bucky nods, his eyes fixed on his plate. “And I’m used to not remembering important shit but still somehow knowing it anyway, but this is—it’s a lot, okay?”

“I get that, I do,” Steve says. “But what do you two have to lose by just going on like normal?”

“Ignoring it and pretending everything’s normal hasn’t felt great,” Sam says, slicing a piece of chicken breast more vigorously than necessary.

“Yeah, no, maybe not that, because you had a real tragic breakup energy going,” Natasha says through a mouthful of food, because sometimes she’s the grossest.

Before Sam can contest that characterization, Steve says, “That’s not what I meant, I just mean accept this whole, uh, bond situation _and_ go on like normal. You can do both, can’t you? It’s what you were doing before, while we were trying to figure all this out.”

“And if it’s all the, you know,” Natasha waves her fork and continues, “woo-woo stuff putting you off, maybe Wanda can help.”

Sam and Bucky share a dubious look. “I guess,” says Bucky.

“It’s worth a shot,” Sam concedes.

* * *

 _Go on like normal_. Right, Sam can do that. For certain values of normal, he can definitely do that.

Training is normal, for example. So he trains, with both Steve and Bucky, and the Avengers as a whole. Despite Steve’s advice to go on as normal, he still insists that Sam and Bucky train together until they’re both certain the whole bond situation won’t distract them in the field, and Sam allows that this is a good idea.

Which means they have a whole lot of brutal, grueling training sessions where the team throws everything at Sam and Bucky, both together and separately. It’s overwhelming and disorienting at first, the whole fight echoed and doubled across their bond, splitting their attention to disastrous effect. Sam keeps failing to catch the shield, and Bucky keeps making shots a half-second too late, and when one of them takes a hit, they both stagger, and all in all, it’s a shitshow. Blocking the bond doesn’t go much better; it takes up focus Bucky can’t spare, and it leaves Sam too distracted as he constantly checks on Bucky.

“You’ve gotta trust that your teammates can look after themselves, Sam,” says Steve from his position watching on the sidelines.

“I _know_ ,” Sam tells him.

Logically, he knows that just because Bucky’s blocking the bond, it doesn’t mean he’s in danger. Tell that to his heart or his soul or what the fuck ever though. Mid-battle, even mid-training battle, the bond going blank feels about as panic-inducing as flying blind while taking fire does.

“Is this because you think I can’t handle a fight?” Bucky asks Sam, after a particularly shitty training session. He’s scowling, arms crossed and his shoulders so tense they’re practically vibrating, his frustration and anger spiking uncomfortably along their bond, jagged and prickly in an almost physically tangible way. “Because I see you train with Steve, and you’re not like this with him. Steve and I are both goddamn super soldiers, Sam, we’re pretty hard to kill. You don’t gotta have your eye on me like I’m a toddler a second away from running into traffic. Or—if you think I'm gonna snap, go all Winter Soldier—”

“No! That's not it, I swear. And I know you can handle yourself, I _know_ ,” Sam says, rubbing at his face in exhaustion. “I just—it feels like something’s really wrong, when we’re blocking that dumb bond.”

Bucky relaxes some now, shoulders loosening as he sighs. “Yeah, I guess it does,” he admits. “Maybe if I ease up on it? Block it less?”

“Maybe. But it shouldn’t be all on you.”

Of the two of them, Bucky’s the one who’s the best at actually manipulating the bond, apparently thanks to the work he’s done for his recovery with healers in Wakanda. Sam’s clumsy with it in comparison, fumbling with this new soul-sense with all the skill of a baby trying to use fine motor skills. But that doesn’t make it fair for Bucky to have to take on most of the work.

“We can work on it together,” Bucky offers. “I can try to show you how to do it, maybe. Don’t know if I’ll be any good at teaching you, I’m no expert, but we might as well try.”

“This is gonna involve, like, meditating together, isn’t it.”

“Yup.”

So when they’re not training or dealing with Avenger duties, they head up to the rooftop garden and sit together, criss-cross applesauce. Or in Bucky’s case, in a full lotus position, because he’s flexible and has spry supersoldier bones instead of knees that go _snap crackle pop_ like Sam’s.

Despite his disclaimers, Bucky’s a careful, patient teacher, and with the way his calm ripples along the bond, Sam finds that meditation isn’t so hard for him as it has been in the past. He can’t achieve Bucky’s absolute stillness, can’t get anywhere close to the way Bucky can let everything in his head go silent, but he can get to a place that’s calm and quiet enough to let him really experience the bond as a thing he can use as well as sense. Holding hands helps even more, enough that Sam has a vivid impression of Bucky’s soul: impossible to describe, but unmistakable.

“So, uh, I’m not exactly an expert here,” Bucky begins slowly, “But what works for me is to imagine all the—stuff—from the bond as an actual image, a real thing you can, you know, interact with in your head. That’s what worked for me when I was getting rid of the trigger words.”

Sam squints at him. “I thought Shuri did some Wakandan tech magic and pulled ‘em right out of your head.”

“She made it so they didn’t work, yeah,” says Bucky with a shrug. “But they were still—uh, pretty bad. Like, just hearing them, was—upsetting.” There’s an unhappy sort of shockwave along the bond like the tremor of an earthquake, and Sam suspects Bucky’s significantly understating matters here. “Part of how they worked was they were all tied up with memories, so I had to—confront them, I guess, and if I imagined the words as an actual thing to pull out of the memory—” Another tremor, then Bucky breathes in slowly and all is calm again. “Anyway, that worked, so. Maybe something like that’ll work for you too.”

“Yeah okay. Worth a try, anyway,” Sam says, and tries to relax, tries to start building a mental image the way Bucky’s described it.

“When I asked you how this whole thing felt to you, you said it was like I was in the apartment next to yours, so try imagining that?”

Sam considers it, then shakes his head. “Nah, that doesn’t quite fit anymore.”

If Sam is going to put an image to Bucky’s soul, it sure as hell isn’t going to be an _apartment_. That feels wildly inaccurate and wholly inadequate, too small and limited. Imagining either of their souls as an inanimate physical object doesn’t feel right either.Sam frowns, casting around for something that could work. An animal? Maybe…

“Alright, not an apartment or building, but you could still think of a place,” Bucky suggests.

A place, a place…Sam closes his eyes and thinks. Most often, Bucky’s soul puts Sam in mind of water: cool and deep and very blue, sometimes clear and sometimes not, sometimes calm and sometimes troubled, sometimes icy and sometimes welcoming. A lot like his eyes, Sam supposes. But not just water—there needs to be something to account for the sheer strength of Bucky’s will, something to reflect the wonder that’s his soft heart…

“I got it,” Sam says, and conjures up the mental image of a glacier-fed mountain lake, all pure blue waters, surrounded by imposing mountains and deep green woods. That feels right, Sam thinks. That’s a decent translation of his soul sense’s understanding of Bucky. “Now what?”

“Uh…imagine a wall, I guess? Or a fence or something?”

“Like, a building wall or some kind of chainlink fence? Because let me tell you, that’s not matching this aesthetic I’ve dreamed up here.”

“Fine, what’s the aesthetic then?” asks Bucky, an eye roll practically audible in his voice.

“A lake in the mountains.”

“…. _That’s_ how you’re imagining the bond?”

“No, that’s how I’m imagining your _soul_ , dummy.”

Bucky inhales sharply, sharp disbelief rocketing down the bond in a way that makes the whole lake Sam's imagining turn restive, like a wind’s kicking up. “What, is there a monster in the lake? Is it a lake that’s, I dunno, frozen over or that’s been recently bombed—”

Sam opens his eyes to glare at Bucky.

“I really don’t get why you’re set on thinking your soul’s a horror show or something you gotta protect me from. No, there’s not a monster in there, and it’s a really pretty lake, with a nice little forest full of happy little trees and everything. Maybe there’s a Bucky Bear in the woods though,” Bucky scowls at him. It’s pretty cute, so Sam just raises his eyebrows and continues, “Anyway, I’m not ruining this pristine vista I’ve got going with a dumb wall or ugly fence.”

Not to mention, he doesn’t like the implications of imagining a barrier like that. Maybe he’s overthinking it, but it feels too much like locking Bucky away, and he doesn’t deserve that.

“It’s just a visualization, Wilson, not an actual—” He clearly thinks better of arguing with Sam and sighs. “Fine. You gotta imagine something that makes it hard to see, or distant, or something.”

“What do you imagine, anyway?”

“A wall ruining the pristine vista of your soul,” says Bucky dryly. “Seriously though, I imagine the bond like a circuit, basically, with switches.”

“Boring.”

“It doesn’t need to be interesting, it just needs to work. So find something that does.”

“Alright, alright…” he says, and closes his eyes again. Something that will make the visualization hard to see, without entirely blocking it…Sam’s got it. A snow storm. “Got it! Is it working?”

The bond goes hazy and fuzzy, without fully blocking Sam’s sense of Bucky’s presence, so Sam _thinks_ it’s working.

“Yeah…yeah, I think it is.”

They practice some more, trying to hit the ideal ratio of blocking the bond enough to avoid distraction and keeping it open enough to avoid feeling like they’ve lost one of their senses. The snow storm visualization works pretty well, and so does imagining himself soaring high above the pure blue of the mountain lake, so that it’s just a gleaming jewel below him. At the next training session with the team, it seems to work great, both Sam and Bucky finally fighting on all cylinders, no more dropping the shield or missing shots. At least, until Bucky gets knocked out of his sniper perch and falls.

The training room’s floor is padded, and it’s not exactly a long drop, especially not for a super soldier. But it still makes the bad kind of adrenaline flood through Sam in one cold, paralyzing rush, like the lake he’s visualizing has frozen and Sam and Bucky have both fallen through the ice. It’s hard to breathe all of a sudden, and definitely hard to keep up any kind of proper form with the shield. Not long after Bucky goes down, Sam’s two seconds too late to barrel roll away from one of Wanda’s energy beams, and he catches it straight in one of his wings before careening into a wall.

“Better,” says Steve. “But, and I know this is real rich coming from me, you can’t let the battle go to shit just because Bucky takes a hit.”

Sam sighs. “We’ll work on it.”

*

“Maybe we just can’t ever be in the field at the same time,” says Bucky as he lies down on the Avengers’ locker room bench with a groan.

Apparently stowing his weapons and getting his boots off is about all he’s capable of before needing a break, because he’s still in all the rest of his gear. Sam sits down next to him and tugs at the straps of Bucky’s shoulder harness until Bucky heaves himself up with a groan, and then Sam gets to work unbuckling the assorted straps and fastenings of Bucky’s body armor. When he’s done with that, he plops his still-booted feet in Bucky’s lap, and though Bucky makes a grumpy noise, he still unlaces Sam’s boots before pulling them gently off.

“We’ll get the hang of this, we’re getting better at it,” Sam insists. “It’s like when I first started using Redwing, just gotta get used to the new input. It’ll be fine.”

And eventually, it is. Bucky gets the idea to spar with Steve while keeping the bond wide open, so Sam can get used to feeling Bucky take some reasonably safe hits, and it helps.

Slowly but surely, they adapt, they learn to accommodate this new weird sense, and it even comes in handy. Bucky knows exactly when Sam needs cover fire, and Sam knows when Bucky’s spotted danger a split-second before he reports it over comms. Sometimes, Sam can let the shield fly and know that Bucky will be in position to catch it on the rebound, or Bucky can jump from one of his sniper perches and know that Sam will fly by to catch him. Nothing and no one is ever going to replace having Riley as a wingman, but this new, solid partnership Sam and Bucky have comes real close.

Their post-Blip missions settle into an easy groove: mostly they’re dealing with organized crime and terrorists who are trying to take advantage of post-Blip chaos and confusion, and it’s nothing too different from the kind of ops Sam had been running with Steve and Nat before Thanos, only easier now that he doesn’t have to worry about being on the run from the law. He’s sure they’ll have to deal with some fresh disaster soon enough. Until then, Sam’s just going to appreciate the satisfaction of a superhero job well-done, with a partner and a team who have his back.

The whole dealing with this bond thing and going on with a normal life gets easier too. Despite all her caveats that her powers might not be able to help, Wanda helps Sam practice using the hard to pin down soul-sense, enough so that Bucky’s not always left managing the flow of the bond between them.

“How are you so much better at this?” Sam whines, after a session of mental visualization with Wanda leaves him overstimulated and wrung out. Even lying on the couch watching a dumb sitcom is proving to be too mentally taxing, but it’s too early to go to sleep, so vegetating on the couch with Bucky it is.

“Practice,” Bucky says unhelpfully. “And trying a lotta different things. Meditation, visualization, this psychoactive mushroom tea, lucid dreaming, this thing that was kinda like hypnosis but not…. Most of them helped, one way or another. Got me used to weird mental coping strategies, anyway.”

“Not sure tripping balls on shrooms is gonna help me out here,” says Sam, though he is kinda tempted, and he definitely wants Bucky to tell him more about that at some point. “Lucid dreaming, though. What kind of baller dream life are you living every night?”

Bucky snorts. “Mostly it just means I know I’m dreaming a memory. Pretty much all of my dreams are still just my brain spitting out memories, it’s not that exciting,” he says, and Sam’s overtired brain begins to follow that revelation to its distressing implications for that nightmare Sam had felt Bucky having, when Bucky asks, “Is your head hurting?”

“Kinda. I’ve got that head full of cotton feeling.”

Bucky hums and scoots closer to Sam on the couch. “C’mere,” he says, and Sam lets himself be gently manhandled until his head is in Bucky’s lap. Bucky starts rubbing careful circles on Sam’s temples with his fingers. He’s not using quite enough pressure to make it a massage, but it still feels good. Biofeedback, Sam remembers vaguely, their bodies responding to each other. “Alright?” murmurs Bucky.

“Yeah, thanks.”

The physical contact lulls Sam into a pleasantly hazy doze, and the bond between him and Bucky is at its gentlest and easiest, Bucky’s soul lapping against Sam’s like small waves against a lakeshore. He’s dozing, halfway to a dream about a boat ride in golden waters under a flaming, sunset orange sky, when Bucky says his name, rests his warm hand on Sam’s cheek.

“Sam,” Bucky says again, softly. “C’mon sweetheart, get up, you gotta eat something before you go to bed.”

Sam grumbles, turning his face into Bucky’s palm and pressing a kiss there. Bucky sucks in a sharp breath, a flash of shivering shock racing down the bond, and now Sam’s wide awake. And still with his head on Bucky’s lap, shit. He struggles back upright, and Bucky jumps up from the couch, and it’s just—awkward. Really awkward. They mutter apologies without looking at each other, and eat dinner in mostly silence, while their bond hums like a plucked string, a long and sweet vibration that’s all that’s left of their thoughtless intimacy.

* * *

“You and Bucky are getting awfully cozy,” remarks Natasha one morning after Steve and Bucky have left.

“What? No we’re not,” Sam denies automatically, and gets the raised eyebrow of disbelief in response.

“You put his hair up for him this morning. He said, and I quote, ‘thanks, sweetheart,’ and kissed you on the cheek. You were cuddling on the couch the other night.”

Sam mentally rewinds to breakfast: Bucky at the stove, stirring the scrambled eggs, his hair half falling out of its ponytail after their morning run. And okay, yes, Sam had come up behind Bucky to pull his soft hair back and secure it all in his low ponytail, because no one wanted stray hairs in their eggs, and—shit, Bucky had kissed him on the cheek, absent-minded and casual, like they did it all the time. Sam hadn’t even registered it as weird.

“Shit, I didn’t even realize,” he says, mostly to himself, and replays all his recent interactions with Bucky.

There has been, he belatedly realizes, a whole lot of PDA, or what passes for PDA with someone as careful of his personal space as Bucky is: Bucky’s hand resting on Sam’s back; both of them usually sitting close enough for their thighs to touch or Sam putting his feet in Bucky’s lap on the couch; and too often, reeling each other in for quick hugs and sometimes long ones, after training sessions, before missions, in the kitchen, in the elevator after frustrating meetings...

“Well don’t freak out about it, it’s cute,” says Natasha.

“Cute?! I don’t even notice we’re doing it! That’s weird, Nat! That’s really weird!”

“Okay, but is it _bad_?”

It’s like being affectionate with Bucky is a habit he doesn’t remember learning. And no, it doesn’t feel bad or wrong, sure, but...

“It’s not exactly great for maintaining boundaries.”

Natasha shrugs. “Bucky sure doesn’t seem to mind. As far as I can tell, you’re the only person other than Steve who he’s okay with being touchy-feely with.”

“Shuri, too,” Sam says, like the fact that he automatically knows that makes any of this better.

“Listen, set aside all the Soul Stone stuff. You like him, right?”

“Not appreciating this high school flashback, Nat,” he says, and she glares at him, unamused. “Fine, yeah, I like him.”

“Alright then. I’m going to say one more thing, and then I’m staying out of this: if you like him, and if you’re going to keep accidentally doing cute, coupley things, maybe consider trying out an actual relationship? Just a suggestion.”

* * *

An actual relationship. Natasha makes it sound easy, simple. Soul Stone Sam had apparently decided it was. Fully alive Sam who, not counting the time spent mostly dead, hasn’t been in a serious romantic relationship in nearly a decade? Not so much.

It’s not like Natasha’s suggestion is off-base though: part of what’s weird about this whole situation is how he and Bucky fall unthinkingly into doing coupley things, without actually being a couple. Their relationship is all jumbled up and out of order, full of gaps, and maybe they’ll never be able to sort it all out, or learn what’s in those empty spaces. They could start something new though. It's what a lot of other Soul Stone couples are doing. Sam's just not sure he's ready for that.

So Sam hasn't been in an for real, serious relationship since Riley. Is that really so surprising? It had taken him a couple years to get his shit together after losing Riley and after being deployed, and that was totally normal. He'd gotten his honorable discharge, worked on handling his trauma, grieved Riley. Not being in a relationship for those first couple of years had been the right call, Sam's sure of that. No one deserves to compete with a ghost, and that's all any romantic partner would've been doing those first few years. Then Sam had become a counselor, and he'd put his focus on his job, on his clients, but he hadn't been antisocial or celibate or anything. He'd had some flings here and there, one-night stands and casual dates. Enough to _feel_ like he was putting himself out there, even if he never clicked with anybody. There'd been Simone eventually, who'd been more than a fling. Admittedly, he'd just gone through the motions with her, performing all the normal relationship stuff while feeling almost none of it, at least not the way he'd felt it with Riley. He'd _tried_ though, he'd been so sure it would work out if only he tried hard enough. And then Steve had come along, and, well, being a superhero and then a superhero fugitive were great reasons for not getting in any romantic relationships.

He's always had a good reason for avoiding romance, for avoiding commitment, is the thing. Maybe those reasons are beginning to feel more like excuses now. Like in this one thing, he's let the inertia of grief take over. It's not what Riley would've wanted for him. Sam's not a tragic widower kind of guy: he's made himself a good life, if an unconventional one, without Riley. He misses Riley every day, loves him as hard as ever, but Sam can't pretend that he doesn't have it in him to love someone else the way he'd loved Riley, because his soul knows better, the Sam who'd lived through those five years in the Soul Stone knows better. What Sam's not sure of is whether he has it in him to lose someone the way he'd lost Riley. Surely there are some blows to the heart, to the soul, that you can't survive taking twice.

And anyway, Bucky hasn't given any indication that he wants a relationship beyond what they have now. So maybe neither of them are ready just yet. There's no point in pushing it, in going too fast, Sam reasons. They can just keep going on as they have been, see what happens from there. 

* * *

The first big Avengers mission post-Thanos, one that demands almost the whole team, has them flying out to Washington state to handle what looks like a mass hostage situation at a haunted house-themed county fair.

It’s an urgent enough situation that they debrief on the flight over as information comes in from LEOs on the scene, Natasha coordinating it all from the command center in the Tower.

“How many hostages are we looking at here?” Sam asks.

“The fair’s ticket office estimates about 250,” reports Natasha. “Maybe less, some people probably left before all this. We’re still trying to figure out just what the situation is, there are a lot of conflicting reports right now. Some are saying it’s an active shooter situation, we’ve got other eyewitness reports that are claiming aliens, but…” Natasha trails off, and Sam doesn’t need to see her to know she’s shrugging. “There’s a haunted house, it’s almost Halloween. Could just be people in costumes.”

Sam winces; at least 200 people, in the dark, some of them costumed and all of them probably terrified and panicking. Human or alien perpetrator, it’ll be a mess no matter what.

Bucky frowns as he examines a holographic projection of satellite imagery of the fairgrounds. It shows a handful of buildings, a half-dozen or so booths, a few classic county fair attractions like a ferris wheel and enormous bouncy house, a lot of picnic-style seating, a big parking lot. The fairgrounds are encircled by some fencing, mostly the temporary chainlink kind, and some crowd control fencing. None of it amounts to much in the way of cover or security.

“How the hell are they keeping that many people hostage in a space that’s barely enclosed? Is someone sniping at anyone trying to escape?” asks Bucky.

“A SWAT team just arrived at the scene, hang on…they’re saying there’s a force field? They can’t get in. So, I’m gonna guess this is aliens.” There’s a pause, then Natasha adds, “Yup, aliens, Okoye just sent over Wakanda’s imaging, there’s a cloaked ship hovering a few thousand feet up.”

“Weird place for aliens to invade,” says Lang, and a chorus of agreement echoes around the quinjet.

“We can figure out why they’re here later,” Sam says. “First, we gotta get all those hostages to safety.”

By the time they arrive at the fairgrounds, Sam and Rhodey have hashed out a tentative battle plan: Sam, Lang, Van Dyne, Wanda, and Banner will be on the ground, working to get the hostages free, while Rhodey and Bucky will stay in the air to deal with the cloaked space ship. Sam’s not thrilled about Bucky being air support. Bucky’s a fine pilot, even if it is courtesy of HYDRA, but it’s not a scenario they’ve trained much for, and Sam’s used to being air support besides. The role reversal is unsettling; Sam would rather have Bucky on his six, on the ground, than to have him in the air facing off against a spaceship with unknown weapons capabilities. Bucky’s the best man for the job though, and T’Challa and Okoye are sending Wakandan talon jets to offer additional air support, so Sam sucks it up, makes sure none of his disquiet travels along the bond.

“You gonna pull some Top Gun moves for me, Barnes?” Sam teases Bucky as the quinjet bay doors open.

“Not sure what that means, Wilson,” Bucky calls cheerfully, the white flash of his grin just visible as he glances over his shoulder at Sam. “But it better not be a knock on my piloting skills. I’ll have you know I’m doing better than Steve when it comes to flying planes, I haven’t ever crashed one! Well, not while I was in it, anyway.”

“Not a super reassuring thing to say, Barnes!” says Lang, and Sam has to agree.

There’s no more time for banter though: they’re in position over the forcefield, and Sam needs to do a flyby to see just how impenetrable that force field is. Sam extends his wings, steps out of the quinjet, and glides into the night.

* * *

It turns out the aliens are some real bottom of the barrel Thanos minions, who only just got the memo that a) Thanos is dead and b) the Infinity Stones have been destroyed, not to mention that c) none of the people in knock-off plastic or cardboard Iron Man suits roaming around the fairgrounds are the actual Iron Man, god rest his soul, so the minions’ whole revenge plan is just a total nonstarter. Dumbasses or not, there are still a couple dozen of them terrorizing poor innocent folks who’d wanted scares of the person in a costume jumping out at you variety, not the literal, actual alien invasion kind, and the aliens' ship is armed and dangerous.

The mission goes smoothly enough at first: Lang goes quantum small and gets through the force field, disabling it from the inside, which lets the rest of the Avengers and their SWAT team backup make a stealth approach into the fairgrounds to begin evacuating people to safety. Rhodey and Bucky hold steady, weapons trained on the spaceship in case it makes a move. Sam's bond with Bucky is humming along unobtrusively, nothing in the purity of Bucky’s focus to distract Sam, or vice versa.

Things get dicier when the aliens finally catch on to the Avengers’ presence inside the force field, and then the real battle’s on. It’s nothing the team can’t handle, especially after the near-overwhelming battle with Thanos, but there are still civilians to worry about. Sam’s more than got his hands full leading the team and fighting the aliens while getting civilians to safety. Which is of course when another front of the battle opens up.

“Guys, the spaceship is on the move, and it looks like it’s powering up some weapons,” Rhodey reports over comms. “Barnes and I are going to engage, everyone on the ground, get to cover if you can.”

“Where’s the rest of our air support?” Sam demands.

“Five minutes out,” says Bucky, and his voice is steady and calm. “War Machine and I can distract this thing until then.”

There’s a lot of chaos after that as Sam works with Wanda and Banner to take out the remaining half dozen or so aliens, while an air battle rages above. Sam can only spare a few glances upward every so often, and to his eye, Rhodey and Bucky seem too damn outmatched by the Thanos minions’ enormous ship. They’re harrying the thing enough to keep it from taking aim at the civilians and Avengers on the ground, but War Machine’s repulser blasts don’t seem to be doing much damage, and neither are the quinjet’s guns.

There’s no fear racing along the bond though, so however badly that air battle’s going, Bucky’s not yet worried about it.

“Get that force field back up,” Sam orders Lang and Van Dyne. “See if you can move it to cover the civilians.”

“On it, Cap!”

Sam shoves all his own worry aside, and reaches for some of the same unshakable focus Bucky’s got going. Sam has two nasty, bipedal crocodile looking aliens to take care of, and he thinks he can ricochet the shield off one of them to catch the other, and if Wanda finishes off the two she’s dealing with, then the fairground turned battlefield should be clear. Just as he lets the shield fly, he feels it: his bond with Bucky snapping shut into absolute, terrible silence and emptiness, and at nearly the same time, he sees a bright light flash out of the corner of his eye. A couple seconds later, the explosive sound and the blast's shockwave hit him.

The aliens go down, and the shield sails past Sam to clatter onto the ground as he looks up in horror. The quinjet is nothing but flames and debris in the sky, like the worst kind of fireworks. And the bond is gone, dark and silent and empty, a line reaching out into nothing.

Distantly, he hears Rhodey over the comms. “Barnes, come in. Barnes, do you read me, report—”

Riley had been blown out of the sky like that, thinks Sam, still looking up. There one moment, gone the next. The funeral had been closed casket, naturally. Sam hadn’t asked, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t managed to find all of Riley. They won’t be able to find all of Bucky now either. Or any of him, probably. Maybe just his vibranium arm.

The silence inside Sam is somehow the loudest thing he’s ever heard.

Sam turns, looks for the shield. Picks it up. Steve had done the same, after every time he’d lost Bucky. Sam had kept going, after he’d lost Riley, he’d finished the damn mission. Sam could do it again. He has to. He can barely feel his heart pounding through the empty void opening up inside of him like a sinkhole, but it must be beating, because he’s still moving, he’s still alive.

God, he doesn’t want to do this, isn’t sure he can. Not again. 

“Force field’s up, Cap,” says Lang, breathless. “Shit, is Barnes—”

“I don’t see or sense any more aliens on the ground,” reports Wanda, as the Wakandan talon jets arrive and engage with the now smoking spaceship. “Cap—Sam, are you—”

“Yeah,” he says, not even sure what question he’s answering. That he’s still here, maybe. That Bucky isn’t. _You’re still here, Wilson. You have a goddamn job to do._ “Fall back—”

Before he can finish the order, he feels the bond flare back into life as if it had never been gone at all, and there’s Bucky’s soul again, crystal clear to Sam’s soul sense: still that same glacier blue mountain lake tucked sweetly between mountains and forest, its waters rocking with the aftershock of some impact, but still there, still whole and perfect and entirely too welcoming. It’s all Sam can do to stay on his feet.

“Uh, Sam, Rhodes, can I get a pick up?” comes Bucky’s winded voice over the comms. “I’m kind of stuck in the ferris wheel, my parachute’s caught—”

Sam should say something, Sam should use his wings and go get Bucky, but he’s stuck, trapped by the gravity of grief, frozen by a shock that hasn’t yet faded.

“I got you, Barnes,” says Rhodey. “Jesus, don’t scare us like that, man. Thought you were a goner.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says. “Only had time to pull the eject switch, wasn’t sure it would work—Sam, I’m okay, I swear—”

He has no idea how the hell this feels from Bucky’s end, but it must be concerning, because Bucky’s thrown the bond wide open, as if to provide Sam with an excess of proof that he’s fine. Or as if to apologize for shutting it down so totally before.

“Alright,” he says, surprised to hear how breathless he sounds, and he takes a few deep breaths. Bucky’s fine, it’s all good. The mission’s almost over, the civilians are safe. It’s fine, Sam’s fine. Everything's _fine_. “Good. Let’s finish up here, do a couple sweeps of the fairgrounds.”

In the distance, the aliens’ spaceship tilts precariously, even more smoke billowing out of it, and with one more volley of fire from the Wakandan talon jets, it falls, plowing into the fairground’s parking lot with the deafening crunch of many dozens of cars getting flattened. The ground under Sam’s feet shakes.

“And someone get the fire department here, I guess,” Sam adds with a sigh.

* * *

Sam doesn’t actually lay eyes on Bucky until it’s nearly dawn. Which is fine, they’re both busy with post-battle cleanup and coordination, and it’s not like Sam doesn’t know Bucky’s okay. Bucky has apparently decided it’s more important to reassure Sam that he’s fine than it is to avoid distracting him, or maybe this is just his version of an apology, because he’s made no effort to obfuscate or limit the bond. To be fair, Sam’s not making any kind of effort to do that either. He hasn’t got the energy or focus to spare.

When he does see Bucky, there’s the usual helpless joy and relief, swiftly followed by furious fear, because _how fucking dare he_. How dare Bucky look windblown and tired and faintly singed, but still so damn good, how dare he be so happy to see Sam after pulling that bullshit with the bond, and how dare he pull Sam into a tight hug now. Sam makes an inarticulate noise of rage against the hot skin of Bucky’s neck, all his fear catching up with him again as he sucks in a breath that smells like burned things and flames and sweat, all proof that Bucky's here and alive.

“I’m fine, I promise, I’m sorry—”

Somehow Sam doubts Bucky knows what he’s apologizing for. He almost shoves Bucky away, but he can’t quite make his arms let Bucky go.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he manages to say.

“Got it, no dying and no blowing up planes.”

“That’s not what I mean, asshole! I mean, that shit you pulled with the bond! I thought you were fucking dead!”

Sam jerks out of Bucky’s grip, and Bucky’s big-eyed frown in response is not making Sam feel any less frantic or pissed off.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize it would be that bad, I guess. Felt pretty shitty on my end too, believe me. I just didn’t want you to feel it if—if I didn’t make it. ”

Didn’t want Sam to feel him dying, is what he’s trying to tactfully avoid saying. Sam’s not sure that what Bucky did do was all that much better. On Sam's end, there was functionally no difference between feeling Bucky die or feeling the bond disappear. Both options are intolerable, he realizes. Either way, Sam doesn’t want to fucking feel this, he doesn’t want to feel any of this.

He can’t do this again.

“Sam?” asks Bucky, reaching for him again.

“I can’t, Bucky. I just—I can't do this.”

Sam steps back, summons up what focus and energy he has left, and sets about building a mental wall, blocking off the sense of that pristine mountain lake that represents Bucky’s soul. His wall is an ugly thing in comparison, a dull and blank stretch of concrete. This isn’t how Sam usually blocks off the bond: this is no gently obscuring snow flurry, no bird’s-eye distance as if he’s soaring above the lake. It’s blunt force blocking, it’s the equivalent of slamming a door shut in Bucky’s face and then barricading the door. And Bucky can feel it, because of course he can.

“Oh,” Bucky says, his voice faltering. “Right. Yeah, sorry, I know I’ve been keeping the bond too open—”

“Let’s get going. We’ve still got work to do, Barnes.”

Bucky’s face goes too-still then, as blank as the damn wall Sam’s put up between them. “Understood, Cap.”


	4. Chapter 4

Sam keeps up the wall through post-mission cleanup, and he keeps it up on the flight back to the Tower, and he keeps it up through the post-mission briefing and the post-mission press conference and days after. Bucky doesn’t say a word about it to him, until he spots Sam rubbing at his temples one morning after a too-quiet breakfast, Steve and Natasha eyeing Sam and Bucky in concern.

“You can drop it,” Bucky says quietly, and he’s not meeting Sam’s eyes. “I can handle blocking it easier than you can.”

“No, I’ve got this,” he says shortly, and Bucky nods, still avoiding Sam’s eyes.

“Alright. Just—let me know if you want me to—”

“Sure. I’ve gotta go, me and Natasha have that thing with the World Council.”

Bucky lets him go without another word. Sam’s almost disappointed, though he’s not sure why. It’s not as if there’s anything Bucky can say.

“Are you and Bucky okay? What happened in Washington?” asks Natasha when they’re in the car.

“We’re fine. Had a close call, but we’re fine.”

“Not looking at each other or talking to each other is fine,” she says with disbelief.

Sam sets his jaw and shrugs. “Yeah. The bond’s just getting to be a bit much, is all.”

* * *

Later, Sam realizes he’s been downright lucky to have avoided this particular nightmare for so long. He’s always thought of it as a kind of tumor lurking malignantly inside of him, sometimes shrinking, sometimes growing, but always recurring, never gone, always ready to release its terror and pain. No amount of therapy or time will ever be enough to fully beat it, and Sam’s come to terms with that. It’s come less often in recent years, crowded out by other bad dreams or the deep sleep of being an exhausted superhero, but seeing Bucky seemingly blown out of the sky is an obvious trigger for a recurrence. Those are daytime thoughts though. In the night, when the nightmare has him in its grip, Sam’s not thinking anything other than _please god no_.

He’s back in the dark skies over Bakhmala, RPGs exploding all around him in a percussive, strobing barrage, far worse than the battle had been in real life. And unlike real life, he’s falling.

This is where he lost Riley, and yet, just like usual, the nightmare doesn’t linger on that awful moment when Riley had been blasted out of the sky. This nightmare is about the moments directly after Riley’s death, those minutes of sick disbelief and swelling grief stretched out to a grotesque, impossible length as he watches Riley burn up and crash like a meteor, out of Sam’s reach, while Sam falls and falls, wingless and uncontrolled, without even a parachute to slow his descent.

He’s at terminal velocity, he has to be, and yet, the ground isn’t getting any closer, and what’s left of Riley is getting further and further away, and the RPGs keep exploding around Sam like so many fireworks, and any second now he’s going to hit the ground or be blasted into little pieces—

“Sam!” he hears someone scream over the noise of the wind in his ears and the bombs going off all around him. “Sam, you gotta wake up!”

It can’t be Riley, Sam doesn’t want a new closeup replay of Riley’s death, he can’t take it—a blast lights the night sky, and he sees it’s not Riley, it’s Bucky, falling through the air right alongside Sam. His eyes are wide and scared, his fall as uncontrolled as Sam’s is, and when Sam locks eyes with him, the sky strobes and stutters, the black of night replaced with bright white and gray for a few blinding seconds, before being replaced by night again.

“Sam! It’s just a nightmare, you need to wake up!”

Bucky twists in the air and grabs hold of Sam, and then the sky changes again, too bright, too cold. He recognizes what all the whiteness is now: snow.

They’re in the mountains, and though the sound of bombs has stopped, Sam thinks he can hear the clatter and rattle of a train instead—just as he identifies it, the nightmare shifts again, back to the dark and the firework bombs blooming into heat beside him and Bucky, both of them still falling and falling, the rocky ground under them simultaneously impossibly close and impossibly distant, and it’s then that it really sinks in. This is a nightmare. Sam is dreaming.

Usually, that’s enough to knock him into wakefulness, the moment of realization violently ejecting him back into the waking world. It doesn’t work this time, and somehow that makes it worse, knowing he’s having a nightmare but being stuck in it all the same. Lucid dreaming sucks, who knew.

“Okay, you got any tips for waking up?” Sam asks Bucky, then he laughs. “Shit, I don’t know why I’m asking you, you’re just another goddamn dream—”

The nightmare flashes back into the mountains, and that’s when Sam understands: that part isn’t _his_ nightmare. It’s Bucky’s. It’s Bucky falling from that train in the Alps, it’s how he’d died, sort of, the first time. And while Sam never hit the ground in real life, even his worst nightmares always sparing him the moment of impact, Bucky had no such luck. And he’d said it himself: he nearly always dreamed memories. Bucky knows what it feels like to hit the ground. Before Sam can really get a good panic on about that, the nightmare shifts again, back to the dark, bomb-riddled skies over Bakhmala.

“I’m not part of your dream!” shouts Bucky. “I got pulled into yours! You have to wake up, Sam!”

“I don’t know how!”

Impossibly, their descent speeds up, the rush of air whipping and battering them so they twist and spin as they fall. These nightmares always end before Sam hits the ground, but if Bucky’s right, if this is really Bucky here with him, Sam’s not so sure that’s how this is gonna end now.

 _It isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t some Nightmare on Elm Street shit where if you die in the dream, you die in real life_. _If we hit the ground, it’ll just be an even shittier nightmare. So just wake the fuck up, Wilson!_

“You have wings, remember? Imagine your wings!”

“How about _you_ imagine some wings! Or a parachute!” Fuck, why can’t Sam just _wake up_?

“I’m _trying_ ,” Bucky says, and Sam looks at him, really looks at him, sees the absolute terror in his eyes.

Bucky knows what hitting the ground is like, and he’s only barely hanging onto what little control he has. Sam probably pulled Bucky into this damn nightmare in the first place, his sleeping self unable to keep up the wall between them, and now either Bucky’s about to relive one of the worst moments of his life, or Sam is, and either way, they’ll both feel it.

Fuck this stupid bond. All it’s given them is a whole lot of awkwardness and the evidence of things they’ve lost: five years’ worth of memories and love, if that’s even what this is, and shared pain. So what if it feels good sometimes, so what if affection comes sweet and easy between them. It can’t be worth it.

Sam pulls Bucky closer, tries to get a decent grip on him, and Bucky hangs on tight. _Wings, wings, you have wings, Wilson_ , _use them,_ he tells himself. If they’re going to break out of this nightmare before it reaches one terrible end or another, Sam’s the one who’s going to have to save both of them. But Sam hadn’t been able to save Riley, hadn’t been able to catch Rhodey in time, and he hadn’t been able to do shit last week, when Bucky had nearly gone down with the quinjet. His wings have never seemed to be any use when it matters, and if he can never save the people who matter the most to him—

They’re in the Alps again, where the snow and sky are too bright, and the rocky, icy ground is coming up fast.

Bucky closes his eyes. “Sorry, this is going to hurt,” he says, voice hoarse and shaky, as if what’s about to happen is his fault.

Which, fuck that. If this nightmare is anyone’s fault, it’s Sam’s, and he’s going to get them out of it.

 _Sam Wilson, are you or aren’t you the goddamn Falcon_.

Sam closes his eyes too, and though the icy wind still whips at him, and the sound of exploding RPGs still reaches him, he tries to shove aside the image of the unforgiving icy Alps, deliberately avoids thinking of night over Bakhmala. He thinks instead of the unreal vista of Bucky’s soul, the one he’d thought up as the closest he could get to understanding it. He thinks of soaring over the pure blue waters of that lake, thinks of skimming his wings over its surface, like a falcon in truth, and it’s like the image/feeling/sensation snaps into place.

The rush of wind stops, is caught, and finally, _finally_ , Sam’s flying, his and Bucky’s descent now an easy glide, held up by gentle thermals.

When Sam opens his eyes again, the land below them is jumbled and hazy: there a jagged snow-covered peak, here a severe craggy desert cliff, or a green and dark forest. Bucky’s still holding on tightly to him, face buried in Sam’s chest, and Sam shifts his grip as if he can get Bucky even closer.

“We’re okay,” Sam tells him. “I got you, we’re okay.”

Bucky sucks in a harsh breath and opens his eyes, blinking a few times. He peers around Sam, up towards Sam’s back.

“Holy shit, you’ve got wings,” he breathes.

“Well, yeah, you told me to imagine wings—”

“No, I mean, you have _real wings_.”

Sam twists his head to look over his shoulder, and holy shit, Bucky’s right: these aren’t the mechanical EXO-7 Falcon wings. These are actual wings, like an actual falcon’s, feathered and enormous, in shades of brown and white and black, growing right out of his damn back. But he can’t feel them, even as each powerful wingbeat pushes him and Bucky higher and higher, and the incongruity rattles him. Which is when the dream goes hazy, colors smearing and blurring, Bucky turning intangible in his arms, and finally, Sam wakes up for real.

* * *

He wakes to his heart pounding like he’s just pulled out of a real and near-deadly dive. It takes him a minute to reorient himself, to believe in the reality of the solid bed he’s lying on, to stop his head spinning, and then he remembers: _shit, is Bucky okay?_

It’s hard to disentangle his own feelings from the bond right now, hard to know if the remnants of panic and elation are his or not as he he shakes off what’s left of the nightmare, but what if Bucky hasn’t woken up, what if Sam just disappeared on him and left him to fall—

Sam stumbles out of bed and to the door, ready to barge into Bucky’s room and wake him up. Distantly, the rational part of Sam suggests this might be a very bad idea, that he might get choked out for it, because it’s entirely possible that Bucky will not react well to being woken up suddenly, but Sam doesn’t give a damn, he’ll take some bruises if it’ll spare Bucky a replay of what it is to fall and fall and hit the ground.

It turns out that he shouldn’t have worried, because Sam’s scarcely opened his door when he runs into Bucky, quite literally, both of them crashing together into a hug in the hallway.

“Are you alright?” Bucky asks him.

In nothing more than boxers and a thin t-shirt, with Sam bare-chested, the heat of Bucky’s skin is practically searing, burning away what’s left of Sam’s cold nightmare sweat. Sam should probably let Bucky go, but he’s so warm, and some of their shared nightmare’s urgency is still pounding and fluttering inside of Sam, urging him to take hold of Bucky and not let go. The bond between them is still wide open, strung taut and humming like they’re both tugging on it, gripping it tightly; Sam should lock it down again, should push it away, but right now, that would feel too much like leaving Bucky to fall. Some part of Sam is still convinced they’re both falling at terminal velocity, is still grasping at anything to keep them from hitting the ground, and the press of Bucky’s hands against his bare skin is at least 70% of what’s keeping Sam steady right now.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Sam says. “Sorry I pulled you into that mess.”

“Sorry I made it worse.”

Sam tightens his hold on Bucky, brings up a hand to stroke Bucky’s hair. “Hey, not your fault.”

“Not your fault for having a nightmare either.”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you.” They should really let go. But Bucky’s still holding on tight, his face up against Sam’s neck, and Sam’s not about to deny him any kind of comfort right now. Hell, Sam’s still in need of some comfort of his own. “So, this lucid dreaming business kind of sucks so far.”

Bucky laughs, and they’re close enough to each other that Sam can feel the sound as a kind of shiver across his neck, down his spine, sinking into his chest.

“You got the hang of it in the end. Those wings of yours were pretty cool,” says Bucky, and Sam can feel that too, the words clothed in warmth with just an edge of roughness lingering, the remnants of sleep.

When Bucky finally steps back, there’s still precious little room between them, and it feels natural as anything to move his hand from Bucky’s hair to his stubble-rough cheek and jaw, to cup Bucky’s face with his palm and tilt him into a kiss.

It doesn’t feel like a first kiss. There’s no hesitation or surprise in the way Bucky opens to Sam, there’s no slightly awkward moment where they try to fall into the same rhythm, no unspoken negotiation of give and take. It’s just easy and comfortable, in a slow dancing in the kitchen kind of way, like they know this song backwards and forwards and still love it, like there’s still a steady heat in the way they dance together.

Bucky puts his arms around Sam’s shoulders and sighs, pleased and soft, before kissing Sam deeper, harder, and it doesn’t take long at all after that for their leisurely ease to spark into something hotter and more desperate, long-deferred and ignored want catching into flame with all the speed of a wildfire on dry brush. It’s been a long damn time for Sam, for Bucky too, probably—at least, if they don’t count whatever went down between them in the Soul Stone. And something _must_ have gone down, because there’s muscle memory in their exchange of kisses and in the movement of their hands.

It should feel weird, but it doesn’t, couldn’t, not with the way the bond has turned supple and warm and golden between them. It’s hard to translate the soul-sense into actual sensations at the best of times, and now, with the heat of Bucky’s body and hands and mouth, it’s harder still. It feels like flying in clear skies during the golden hour, maybe, like looking down at the lovely clear lake and green trees and softly shaded mountains that make up Sam’s stitched together soul-sense of Bucky, and knowing for certain: the safest and softest possible landing is waiting for him there. 

“Alright?” Sam asks Bucky between kisses, and Bucky nods, kissing him again, so Sam tugs at him, walks backward until they’re in Sam’s room, where Bucky kicks the door closed gently before walking Sam to his bed, never loosening his hold on Sam. It’s a better, more pleasurable embrace by far than the desperate clutching they’d done during their shared nightmare.

Though it does still seem like they’re in a dream, kind of. Sam’s body knows what it’s doing, without much input from his mind, and in the moment, that’s okay, because some deeper part of him knows what to do, knows everything about this is exactly right.

They kiss and touch in hushed, held-breath silence, a dreamy kind of wonder in the careful way Bucky’s hands smooth over the bare skin of Sam’s back as Sam leans over him to flick the bedside lamp on and then straddles him on the bed. They’re both hard by now, Sam realizes, almost surprised. There’s an awful lot of feeling happening between them, what with all the touching and kissing and the way both are strangely doubled and diffused into the steady heat between them through the bond; that their cocks have also taken some interest in things is nearly an afterthought. Granted, it’s a really nice afterthought, Sam thinks, and indulges in rocking his hips against Bucky’s, unsuccessfully swallowing down a moan at the friction and pressure. The sound makes all the lingering sleepy haze clear from Bucky’s eyes, leaving nothing but burning focus.

Time to move things along, thinks Sam.

When Sam lifts the bottom of Bucky’s shirt, Bucky raises his arms, lets Sam pull it off, and when Sam lowers his mouth to the hot and smooth skin of his chest, to his hard nipples, kissing and tasting as he goes, Bucky gasps, arches up against him, and Sam can swear he feels the zing of sensation flashing across his own skin, settling down to shiver with want at the base of his spine.

Shit, maybe they should have considered the benefits of this whole bond situation some more, Sam muses hazily, because he’s beginning to suspect that fucking is definitely gonna be one of them. No way to know but to test it out, and Sam’s got an idea for how to do that. He drags his hands down Bucky’s sides, taking his time, a long and leisurely touch that leaves Bucky pliant and sighing—he likes just being touched like that, Sam remembers, long and slow, nothing but aimless skin on skin contact, like he’s still trying to satisfy decades’ worth of skin hunger—and then Sam settles his hands on Bucky’s waist for a moment as Bucky drags him in for a long kiss.

Which is a pretty pleasant distraction, but Sam’s not going to be deterred from his experiment here. He slips his hands under the waistband of Bucky’s boxer briefs and pulls them down. Bucky’s cock is a big temptation—in, Sam’s happy to note, more ways than one—but Sam will get to it soon enough. First though, he pulls Bucky’s boxer briefs off slowly, because Bucky’s got long legs and Sam’s right this very moment developing a pretty sincere appreciation for the muscles of his thighs and his slim calves and his downright dainty ankles, and Sam’s hands are practically tingling with their eagerness to map this new/not-new territory.

“Sam,” says Bucky, the first thing he’s said since they first kissed, and Sam’s name in his mouth is a wonder when he sounds like this, low and pleading.

“Shh, I got you,” Sam tells him, and draws his hands back up the muscled length of Bucky’s thighs until they rest on his hips and Bucky’s legs fall open.

Sam takes Bucky’s cock in his mouth, and Sam likes giving head, but this—this is something else entirely. There’s all the expected, visceral reality of having Bucky’s cock in his mouth: the hard heat of him, the taste of his skin and precome, the stretch of Sam’s lips and jaw as he takes him deeper. But Sam feels Bucky’s end of it too almost, the sensation crashing through the bond like the best kind of wave, so surprising that Sam moans and his own cock has that too-good ache of being so turned on he can barely see straight. It’s never felt so fucking good to give a blowjob.

Bucky’s hips press up against Sam’s grip with restless motion as Sam licks and sucks at his cock, and god, it feels so good, his whole body like one big pulse of hot pleasure. Biofeedback, Sam remembers in a giddy haze. Enhanced by physical contact. Apparently good for more than just syncing up heartbeats and meditation.

He’s usually a pretty goal-oriented guy when it comes to blowjobs: it’s about getting his partner off, and Sam’s into that, obviously, but it doesn’t do a ton for him apart from that. Right now though, it really is. He’s feeling something close to hungry and wild for every time Bucky moans his name, for every jerk of his hips, and when Bucky’s hand comes down to pat clumsily at Sam’s shoulder in warning— _Sam, please, I’m gonna_ —Sam doesn’t pull off, just takes it, shaking with how good it feels, with how much he wants it.

For a minute, Sam thinks he’s come too, but no—that pulse of need and pleasure is still pounding through him, urgent and hard, and one look at Bucky laid out under him makes it pound all the harder: he’s flushed and open-mouthed, only a thin ring of twilight blue iris visible around his pupils, the long and lovely lines of his body still arched and reaching for Sam as if he still needs release. Sam wants to touch all of him at once, wants to make up for every second of skin-to-skin touch that Bucky’s missed, wants Bucky’s hands.

“What do you want?” asks Bucky, breathless and rough. “You can have anything, just please—”

Sam kisses him, hard and long and deep, and Bucky moans into it, and Sam thinks Bucky’s even trembling a little still, like he’s still feeling the aftershocks of coming. When Sam has to pull back to catch his breath, he asks Bucky, “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, all his usual sharp focus gone beautifully dreamy and vague. “I can still feel it, like I haven’t even come yet. Sam, c’mon, I need—”

Bucky reaches for him, and Sam goes, gone enough that he seriously considers just rutting against him, but—no, he’s got a better idea than that.

“Here, like this,” he says, and shifts Bucky onto his left side, sliding behind him so they’re practically spooning. He holds Bucky close, the warmth of their bodies together almost feverish, his cock aching.

Either the bond’s at work or Bucky just knows what Sam wants, because Bucky hooks his ankles together and presses his thighs tight against each other, and yeah, that’s what Sam wants. He slides his cock in between the small space between Bucky’s thighs and takes a few experimental, slow thrusts, and groans at how good it feels, the tight and dragging friction of it, growing slippery with Sam’s precome and their sweat. And even better than that is the simultaneous sensation of enveloping and being enveloped, of being held and holding, like Sam’s both the beloved pearl and the protective oyster surrounding it.

He wishes this doubled moment could last forever, wishes this was a dream in truth so that time could go stretchy and slow, but Sam’s not going to last long, especially not when Bucky moans and takes his own cock in hand, hard again already.

“Fuck,” Sam says, need doubling between them, and he matches the rhythm of Bucky’s strokes automatically with his own thrusts. When they come, they come together, the bond going practically supernova between them.

* * *

After they come down, they clean up as best they can, fumbling clumsily with sleepiness and a post-orgasm high that’s showing no real signs of fading.

“So, that’s a fun side effect of this bond thing,” Sam mumbles as they get back under the covers.

Bucky hums drowsily in agreement and arranges them both to his liking until he’s lying on his left side to spoon Sam, tucking Sam in close against him so Sam’s back is flush with Bucky’s chest and Bucky’s hand is resting over Sam’s chest. Sam feels Bucky’s chest move when he takes a deep breath, and there’s something profoundly comforting about that, about being held so closely and so totally, because it’s not just a physical feeling right now, it’s a feeling in the bond too, like Bucky’s as close to Sam as he’s ever been, and it’s both the feeling of flying in safe and clear skies, and the joyful welcome of landing in someone’s open, loving arms.

Sam remembers then: the first time he’d flown in the EXO-7 Falcon wings with Riley when they’d both actually known what they were doing, when they weren’t just constantly fucking up with the jetpack or wheeling clumsily in the sky or crashing—the first time they’d really gotten the hang of it, together. Their take off had been smooth, and they’d flown together as gracefully and easily as actual falcons, gliding easily in the sky, catching the wind just right, each turn sharp and precise. Riley had landed first, soft and perfect as anything, and he’d beamed up at Sam, his arms raised up in celebration, and Sam’s landing had been perfect too, sending him straight into Riley’s arms.

This feeling right now, being held by Bucky? It’s a lot like that memory. And for the first time in a long time, the memory’s more sweet than bitter.

If this is how it could always be, Sam thinks he wouldn’t mind it.

“Is this alright?” asks Bucky.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s—it’s really good.”

Bucky kisses the back of Sam’s neck then, just a quick and sleepy press of lips against skin, and then he’s asleep. Sam follows not long after, held in perfect safety, lulled to deep rest by the ebb and flow of Bucky’s breaths and the sweet, singing hum of the bond between them.

* * *

Sam’s just barely woken up when Bucky says, “We can’t keep doing this.”

Sam sits up, rubbing blearily at his eyes. Though he’s still half under the covers, he’s cold, Bucky far enough away on the bed that Sam can’t feel the heat of his overclocked body, and he can’t feel anything through the bond either.

So it’s gonna be that kind of morning after. He can’t say he’s entirely surprised: what had seemed natural and easy in the hushed dark of the night, when they’d both been feeling raw, seems different in the weak sunlight of an autumn morning, seems far away. Sam’s stomach roils queasily, as if he has a hangover. He’s in no shape to be blocking the bond right now, so it must be Bucky who’s got it on lockdown, the soul-sense between them gone as dark and silent as a long-abandoned house. _Don’t bother knocking, there’s no one home._

“Pretty sure that’s the first time we fucked, Bucky. At least it is so far as I remember.”

Bucky’s sitting up on the other side of the bed, a full foot away from Sam, knees drawn up and hair a mess, eyes fixed on some random point of Sam’s bedroom wall. His handsome profile is stern and harsh, but his pale eyes betray some wound that makes Sam hurt even without the bond open to share the pain.

“No, the—I mean the bond. We can’t—I can’t—it’s no good, Sam. We should—we should try to get rid of it. Ask Wanda if she can do something, or that Dr. Strange guy.”

“Didn’t think the sex was that bad, but okay—”

“That’s not why and you know it,” snaps Bucky, and Sam flinches.

Yeah, okay, clearly trying to lighten the mood with a joke had been a bad idea. Sam’s queasiness doubles, and he remembers that Bucky had said very little last night. Words hadn’t seemed necessary at the time, but fuck, maybe Bucky hadn’t wanted to be intimate last night, maybe he’d been going along with it for Sam’s sake, or maybe it had been some side effect of the bond—

“Did you—did I make you feel like you couldn’t say no last night?” Sam asks, as evenly as he can manage, and Bucky’s head snaps to the side so he can look at Sam, his eyes wide with shock.

“What? No! Jesus Sam, I know you’d never. I told you, this isn’t about the sex. That was—that was, you know, good.”

Sam sighs, too relieved to give Bucky any shit about the cute blush on his face or his awkwardness. Shit, Sam’s not sure he’d ever forgive himself if he’d made Bucky feel like he couldn’t say no to Sam.

“Tell me why then.”

Bucky runs a hand through his morning messy hair in obvious frustration, tugging angrily when he hits a tangled snarl.

“You’re really asking me why we should get rid of this bond when you’re the one who’s been keeping it blocked for a week?” Bucky shakes his head. “It’s just hurting you. _I’m_ hurting you—we should get rid of it.”

There’s no reason for Sam to feel quite this furious and hurt: Bucky’s right, Sam’s the one who’s been doing his best to act like this bond doesn’t exist lately, he’s the one who’s been walling it off. And he’s not even wrong about the bond hurting Sam either. But last night...last night it had felt good and right, like perfect safety. Last night, in the soft and warm dark between him and Bucky, for a little while the memory of Riley had been sweet. There’s no such thing as perfect safety though, as both Sam and Bucky have cause to know. In the light of day, in a cold bed, the bitterness of grief creeps back in, and so does the fear that they’ve set themselves up for another helping of it.

“If that’s what you want,” Sam says slowly. “Alright. But I think we should take some time to think about it.”

“It’s been months already, Sam. Have you remembered a single thing about our time in the Soul Stone? Has the bond gotten any easier to deal with when one of us has a nightmare, or gets hurt, or is in danger?” asks Bucky, his voice low and vehement.

He’s wringing his hands, not in the thoughtful, idle way he does sometimes, but in a white-knuckled kind of way that looks like it hurts. Sam has to clench his own hands into fists to keep himself from taking Bucky’s hands in his.

“No, I haven’t remembered anything,” Sam admits. “And I don’t know.”

He thinks of the moment when he’d thought Bucky was gone for good, when the bond had seemingly blinked out like it had never existed at all and how empty he’d felt, how ravaged. He thinks of the way the bond had felt last night, like holding and being held in perfect closeness, the very idea of loss nothing but a kind memory, a distant possibility. Which is more real? Which can Sam bear to lose, or to keep?

“We need to go to Wanda,” insists Bucky. “We gotta ask her if she can do anything, or if she can start figuring out how to help us get rid of this.”

The desperation turning Bucky’s voice raw makes Sam’s decision for him.

“Okay. Sure, let’s talk to Wanda.”

* * *

When they tell Wanda, she looks like they’ve just asked her to kill a puppy.

“What? But—I thought you were getting used to it?” she asks, baffled and wide-eyed.

“Yeah, no, remember the thing Dr. Strange said about it being psychologically distressing? Turns out, it’s pretty distressing,” Sam says.

Sam carefully doesn’t look at Bucky, but even so, he can see Bucky crossing his arms tightly out of the corner of his eye. Wanda bites her lip, eyes darting between him and Bucky.

“You know I can’t be sure I can even do anything. If this is a bond between souls, if it’s the result of love…”

“It’s a love we can’t remember,” Bucky says. “That we’ll never remember. And in the meantime Sam’s getting a direct line to all my—” he gestures vaguely around his head, as if to encompass _terrible trauma_. “It’s not—it’s not good.”

Wanda frowns. “I understand, I do. I only worry that anything I do to break this bond will really hurt the two of you.”

“Like, emotionally hurt, or physically hurt?” asks Sam, because that feels like a pretty important clarification right now.

“Both!” says Wanda, looking at him like _he’s_ the crazy one for distinguishing between the two. Which, listen, Sam’s not about to discount emotional injuries, he just thinks there’s a big difference between a broken heart and one that’s not actually performing its physical functions.

“Can you at least try?” Bucky asks Wanda. “We could go to Dr. Strange too.”

Wanda fidgets with the long sleeves of her cardigan, still frowning. “I’m willing to see what it might take, I guess. Now that I know what to look for, I think it will go better than when you first came to me, Sam. But I worry that I would harm more than the bond if I try to do anything to it, and these are your souls we’re dealing with.”

Sam looks over at Bucky and raises his eyebrows. “You really sure you want to try this?”

“Yes.”

“And if it’s too dangerous?”

Bucky tilts his head, sets his jaw. “Then we go to Dr. Strange.”

Sam sighs, heart aching. He understands why Bucky wants to do this, why he _needs_ to do it, even. Just yesterday, Sam would’ve been all for it too. Today’s a different day though, after a very different night, and blocking the bond isn’t sitting so easy now, let alone getting rid of it. But Bucky’s not wrong: they can’t keep doing this. They can’t keep going hot and cold on it, can’t keep pretending it’s not there whenever they can’t handle how it makes them feel.

So Sam says, “Alright. Let’s do this then.”

* * *

Wanda takes them to her own apartment in the Tower, where she has them sit on cushions on the living room floor, and hold hands in a circle. There’s some shuffling about of their positions to make sure Sam and Bucky are making skin to skin contact, but once that’s done, Wanda instructs them to try to relax, and to let the bond stay open and easy between them.

When Bucky does so, finally letting the wall he’d been keeping up between them down, tension in Sam’s neck and shoulders that he hadn’t entirely noticed eases away. Even with the cold, choppy waters sense of unrest rocking towards Sam from Bucky’s end of the bond, there’s a relief in feeling him close again in the soul-sense.

“I’m just going to poke around a little, see if I can get a feel for this bond,” Wanda says, and the red tendrils of her power glow where Sam and Bucky’s hands are in hers. Sam doesn’t feel much other than a little bit of tingling heat. She closes her eyes, frowning thoughtfully. “It’s not in your minds, not really, so maybe I should stay out of your heads entirely…”

A pinkish-red haze begins to fill the space inside the rough circle made by their linked hands, an eerie sight that makes Bucky’s grip on Sam’s hand go tight. Wanda opens her eyes and squints into the haze, focusing on the space between Sam and Bucky. When Sam turns to follow her stare, he thinks he can make out something shimmering, and when he looks down at their joined hands, he sees the faintest impression of a pulsing, golden glow.

“There it is,” murmurs Wanda. She lets go of their hands, but the haze stays, as does the glow and shimmer between Sam and Bucky, which Wanda reaches for with her hands and her power, gossamer soft and thin threads flickering red light streaming out. “I won’t do anything yet, but let’s just see—”

Bucky sucks in a sharp breath, and Sam’s not sure why, but then he feels it too, an alarming shudder along the bond as the sense of something, someone else intrudes on it. It’s not a good feeling, not at all. Sam knows Wanda won’t hurt them, knows that for all her power, she’s kind and careful, and still, this feels an awful lot like that soul-sense of Bucky, that serene and protected little mountain lake and Sam’s clear skies over it are about to be rocked by a terrible storm.

“Wanda,” Sam says, trying for a warning kind of tone, but he finds his voice comes out strangled instead.

“Ah, sorry,” she says, and the soul-sense of intrusion recedes into the unsettling but considerably less threatening feeling of being watched, as if Bucky and Sam’s souls are in a snow globe and Wanda’s peering down at them, ready to shake the globe, or maybe twist the knob to play some music.

She wiggles her fingers, squinting in concentration, her whole face screwed up with it, then she points with her index finger to direct the thinnest thread of her power towards them. When it passes into the bare suggestion of a shimmering cord between him and Bucky, Sam barely feels it in any kind of way—not with his mind or his body or his soul—but then Wanda draws a line with her finger, the thread of power following, and it goes towards Bucky, and the moment it connects, everything goes red, a kind of deep and dark hearts’ blood red. Then the red shifts, a dizzyingly fast gradient into a too-familiar orange-amber color—

Then there isn’t any red, there’s just an orange-amber color. It’s everywhere, all around them, endless and undifferentiated and Sam remembers—

* * *

One moment, Sam was mid-battle, flying through the Wakandan jungle, then the next—something happened.

He wasn’t sure what, it felt like a sudden gust of wind blowing not past him, but through him, and then there was nothing but orange-amber light. It was everywhere, all around him, endless and undifferentiated. He felt weird, too light, and as he did a quick inventory, he realized why: all his weapons were gone, his wingpack no longer on his back. No comms either. He was still wearing clothes, the same uniform he’d gone into battle with, but he had nothing else.

What the _fuck_ had just happened?

“Hello?” he called out, and he heard the sound of his own voice, but the vast vista of sunset orange light surrounding him seemed to swallow up the sound.

He turned, looked all around: nothing. Nothing but that same color everywhere. The lack of perspective was beginning to make him dizzy and nauseous.

Had Thanos done something to him? Shit, had Thanos _succeeded_?

It wasn’t a good thought.

Alright, priority one: find someone, anyone else. Priority two, which was actually about on par with priority one, actually: get out of here. Priorities decided on, Sam picked a direction at random and began walking.

He didn’t know how long he walked for. He never felt thirsty or hungry, until he noticed that he wasn’t getting thirsty or hungry when he should have been, and then he was, but only faintly, vaguely. He didn’t get tired; he only fell into a kind of walking doze, mind lulled to silence by the sameness of his surroundings.

When he finally saw a bright blue flare go up in what passed for the sky, the sight jolted him back to full awareness. It was hard to gauge distance, but the flare wasn’t fading. It lingered in the sky like a firework that was frozen in time. Sam started running towards it, unsure if he was running into danger or rescue, but either way, at least it’d be something other than all this nothingness.

It took less time than he expected to reach the source of the flare, and Sam thought he was running faster than he should have been able to, because the small dark blob in the distance got bigger and bigger awfully fast, until finally he could make out what—who—it was.

“Hey! Barnes, is that you?” Sam shouted, and sooner than he should have been, he was standing right in front of Barnes, who looked much like he had when Sam had last seen him mid-battle. “Are you alright?”

“I don’t know,” said Barnes, blinking and frowning at Wilson as if surprised to see him. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean, _you don’t think so_? You don’t think you’re Bucky Barnes or you don’t think you’re alright?”

Now Barnes’ mouth lifted in a small and bitter sort of smile, and there was something too close to despair in his eyes. “I know who I am. But I’m pretty sure I’m dead. And I think you must be too. Thanos won, Wilson.”

* * *

“If you build it, they will come,” said Sam in a showy whisper, before flopping onto his back.

“Shh, I’m trying to concentrate here,” Bucky said, and stayed in lotus position, squinting out at the boring scrubby plain stretching out in front of them, a numbing stretch of beige under an orange sky.

Sam was bored. Being pretty much dead was boring. It was all well and good for Dr. Strange to say cryptic wise wizard shit like _our time will come_ and _we’ll all be needed in battle again soon enough_ , _we just have to wait_ , but he had wizard shit to do. Sam had nothing to do but spread the word throughout the Soul Stone: yeah they were all dead, pretty much, and yeah they were stuck in an all-powerful space rock that existed beyond time and space, but it wasn’t permanent and everyone should just chill out and enjoy the accommodations in the Soul Stone until this all got resolved. Said accommodations had by now at least become something more than an endless expanse of orange light—Strange had said something about the Soul Stone conforming to the psyches of those inside it blah blah psychic resonance blah—so at least they now existed in a bland approximation of Earth. It was pretty much like being stuck on a road trip’s most boring stretch of highway, or an endless bus or train station, sure, but it was at least a _place_ , with buildings and roads and a vague kind of landscape of dull fields and scrubby plains.

Bucky was certain that he could manifest something slightly more interesting than the extra-dimensional equivalent of a rest stop in the middle of nowhere, and to be fair, he maybe wasn’t wrong. Bucky had a knack for manipulating things in the Soul Stone: that flare he’d first sent up that had led Sam to him, changing his own clothes, making unnecessary but psychologically comforting food and drinks out of nothing. He claimed it was because he’d learned to lucid dream as part of his recovery in Wakanda; whatever the reason, Sam was grateful for it. Imagining up a whole new landscape seemed orders of magnitude tougher than the little conveniences Bucky had managed so far though. Still, it was worth a shot.

“Sam, look!”

He heaved himself back up to a sitting position, ready to praise whatever small change in the landscape Bucky had managed, for the sake of morale if nothing else, only for his mouth to drop open in delighted shock. Bucky had managed way more than a small change: he’d recreated the little patch of Wakanda he’d come to call home. Sam had only been there once, tagging along with Steve on one of his visits to Bucky, but he recognized the lake and the little stand of trees, knew the small cottage and adjacent goat pen and garden.

“Holy shit, you did it!” Sam threw an arm around Bucky’s shoulders, giving him a gentle shake of delight. “It looks just like the real thing!”

When Sam turned his head to look at Bucky, the sight of his broad and bright smile was about as stunning as the landscape in front of them. Bucky’s smiles were usually at least a little sad or wry, a lot like Steve’s, or they were shy and tentative, but this smile was all honest joy and delight, and it was kind of a lot for Sam’s heart to deal with. It transformed Bucky’s entire face, forming sweet wrinkles that spoke of joy rather than pain and thawed the icy blue of his eyes into a shade like the warm summer sky. It was a genuine fucking tragedy that life—or death—didn’t often give Bucky a reason to smile like this.

Bucky stood, and offered Sam a hand up. “C’mon, let’s see how it holds up. Might just be like a kind of hologram or something.”

It wasn’t though. Admittedly some of the finer details were a little fuzzy, like a photo that didn’t have the best resolution, but they could both touch and feel it all, and the more time they spent walking around, the more detail filled in.

“Are you doing that?” Sam asked, and Bucky shook his head.

“No, I think it’s like Strange said. It’s just the Soul Stone reacting to us, reflecting what we expect to see. Helps to give the Soul Stone a kind of blueprint, I guess.”

“This is way more than a blueprint,” Sam said, bending to dip a hand in the lake’s cool waters.

“You wanna give it a try? You just have to focus on what you want.”

Sam squinted up at Bucky. “Uh, pretty sure this Inception-level nonsense is beyond me.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “I’m not even going to ask about that reference. You just gotta practice, come on.”

* * *

Under Bucky’s surprisingly patient tutelage, Sam did practice. He got better at making things like food and clothes, but detailed landscapes eluded him. He just couldn’t hold all the details together in his head for long enough. Which kind of sucked, because making his wildest imaginations come to life would’ve been one of the few upsides to this whole pseudo-dead and stuck in an extra-dimensional rock situation.

“Maybe you need even more practice,” Bucky suggested.

They were lounging on a picnic blanket in a recreation of Prospect Park. Not modern Prospect Park, but Prospect Park as Bucky remembered it from the 30s, minus the people. Although that could change soon enough. Any place someone imagined here tended to stick around, and the Soul Stone was developing its own mismatched hodgepodge of little neighborhoods where people congregated together to make some semblance of a normal life.

“Maybe,” allowed Sam.

“Or I could build you whatever you want,” said Bucky.

“Yeah? Even if you’ve never been there?”

Bucky shrugged. “Sure. I could give it a shot, anyway.”

“How about Harlem? My family used to live there before my dad died, still get homesick for it sometimes.”

Which was just as much about the people as it was about the place, but still. Part of Sam would always belong to Harlem, and he’d always planned to move back someday.

“Hmm, it’ll be Harlem from around 1940,” warned Bucky.

“Oh yeah? You spend a lot of time in Harlem back in the day?”

“I got around,” said Bucky with a sly grin. “And some of the best music was happening in Harlem.”

“Okay, I get it, you were hitting up the jazz clubs and dancing ’til dawn,” said Sam. It was a nice thought, a glimpse of a far more happy and carefree Bucky. “Yeah, alright then, show me 1940 Harlem.”

“Might be a little rough in spots, but…” Bucky closed his eyes and scrunched his face up in concentration. Sam left him to it, and after a few minutes, Bucky guided him out of the park and straight into a few square blocks of Harlem, direct from Bucky’s memory of 1940.

“Holy shit,” said Sam, eyes wide as he took in familiar streets in a new context.

“Looks weird without people,” noted Bucky, an assessing look in his eye. Still, there was a pleased curve to his lips as they ambled down the empty streets.

Most of the buildings were basically facades, since Bucky had never been inside them. Given enough time, the Soul Stone would fill them in, working off the collective knowledge of all the other humans stuck in here, but for now, it was like wandering through an exquisitely detailed movie set.

“Show me one of the clubs you went to,” Sam requested after he’d looked his fill, and Bucky did.

There was something melancholic about seeing the club empty, no one on the dance floor or on the stage or at the bar despite the way the haze of cigarette smoke and smell of booze lingered, and when Sam looked over at Bucky, he saw fond grief lingering in the lines around his eyes and mouth.

“Didn’t come to this place often,” Bucky said. “It was too much of a damn schlep from Brooklyn. But it was usually worth the trip. Not that it looks much like it now. Didn’t realize how damn creepy it’d be without people in it.” Bucky tilted his head, frowned in a considering kind of way. “Maybe with music…?”

And then the air filled with a lively jazz number, as bold and bright as if a live band was in here with them. They were the only ones here though, the only people to hear the ghost band playing music out of Bucky’s old memories.

“Hey, show me some of your moves, Barnes. Let’s cut a rug.”

Bucky laughed, most of his melancholy lifting, making his eyes sparkle. “What, you know how to do the jitterbug, Wilson?”

Sam did not, though he _had_ picked up just a little bit of swing dancing in preparation for a friend’s wedding a few years back.

“I got some moves,” he said. “Nothing like you though, probably.”

“Well let’s see ‘em,” Bucky said, raising his eyebrows and opening his arms in invitation as the music’s tempo picked up. “I can even teach you the jitterbug if you want.”

“Why do I feel like you’re patronizing me?” Sam muttered.

Bucky’s only answer was a too-innocent grin, a flashing glimpse of the young Bucky who used to come to this club to dance until dawn, before all his long wars. It made Sam’s heart both flutter and ache as he stepped into the circle of Bucky’s arms, and let Bucky lead him patiently through a dance.

Which was, it turned out, just Bucky lulling him into a false sense of security, because it didn’t take long before Bucky was daring him into an actual fast-paced jitterbug and then they were laughing and falling all over each other, only to straighten up and try again and again, as the ghost band played on.

* * *

There were no gray days in the Soul Stone. They were caught in a perpetual fiery sunset, the sky and horizon always the same deep orange amber color. Despite that, some days still _felt_ gray: dull and oppressive and lacking in light. Today was one of those days.

“Hate to break it to you, Wilson, but don’t think you can get a tan in here,” said Bucky, peering down at Sam, who was lying on the grass beside Bucky’s lake, looking up at the sky, or the inside of the Soul Stone or whatever it was.

“I miss the sky,” he said, and Bucky sat down beside him with a sigh.

“Yeah, me too. I’d make it for you, if I could,” said Bucky, all earnest sincerity, and that was almost enough to make Sam smile.

“I miss Steve and Nat too,” Sam said. “Do you think they’re doing okay?”

Sam suspected they weren’t, how could they be if Thanos had won, but who knew how time was passing out there in the real world. Maybe it had only been seconds for them, maybe Sam and all the others would blink back into existence like they’d never been gone at all.

“I hope so,” said Bucky softly. “That what’s got you feeling down? Worrying about the others?”

“Who says I’m feeling down?”

“You’ve been out here for hours staring up into nothing. Done my fair share of that, so I’m not judging, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t be doing it if you were feeling fine.”

Sam closed his eyes, and all that damned amber Soul Stone light lingered even behind the dark of his eyelids.

“Sometimes I wish we really were all the way dead and this was heaven or whatever, because then at least I’d get to see Riley and my dad again. How fucked up is that?”

If his words worried or surprised Bucky, he made no sound to give it away, and when Sam opened his eyes and turned his head to look up at him, Bucky’s expression was calm and intent, as clear and patient as the lake beside them.

“I don’t think it’s fucked up,” said Bucky softly. “You know, when I first woke up here, I was sure it was hell. Then I saw you, and figured it couldn’t be.”

“Smooth, Barnes,” teased Sam, smiling. “That’s a real smooth pickup line.”

“I didn’t mean it as a line!” protested Bucky, and to Sam’s delight, a pink flush was spreading across his cheeks. “I just meant—you know, you’re not the only fucked up one here. It’s a pretty fucked up situation.”

“Yeah,” said Sam with a sigh, and turned back towards the amber dome above them. He wondered, if he flew up high enough, would he hit the edge of the Soul Stone? Could he pound his fists against the gem and break through?

After a minute of easy silence, Bucky asked, “Who’s Riley?”

It had been a long time since anyone had asked Sam that. It had been longer still since Sam had talked about Riley, he realized. There’d been no opportunity, no reason: no more group sessions at the VA, no one else around who’d known Riley, who’d known who Sam had been with Riley. He’d rarely talked about Riley with Steve and Nat either. Somehow, slowly but surely, as time had blunted the sharpest edges of his grief, it had become a private, hidden thing, the hard and heavy core the rest of him grew and healed around.

“Riley was my wingman,” Sam told Bucky, which was the easy answer. He took a deep breath. “He was more than that.”

For all that it had been risky as hell to be in a relationship, thanks to DADT, loving Riley had been the easiest thing Sam had ever done. So easy that they’d both been reckless with it, unguarded, holding nothing back from each other. They’d been lovedrunk dumbasses, basically, young enough that they’d felt invincible, untouchable.

“Tell me about him?” asked Bucky, and as Sam did, he found that his grief was no longer such a heavy thing, when weighed against his love.

* * *

“Getting real creative there, Bucky,” Sam said, watching with fond indulgence as Bucky painstakingly created a miniature version of Middle Earth in the middle of what had once been his cottage’s goat pen. _The Hobbit_ was, apparently, one of Bucky’s favorite books. According to Bucky, finding out it had sequels and even _movies_ was one of the best things about the future. What a nerd.

“Well we haven’t got any books in here, or movies,” whined Bucky, not taking his eyes off the snow-capped mountain range he was imagining into life. “What else is there to do? There’s only so much meditating a man can do before he gets bored.”

“I think you’re supposed to meditate until you reach enlightenment. And you _could_ join me on my run.”

Bucky blew a raspberry. “No thanks to both of those. Why are you even still working out? We’re basically dead, there’s no point.”

And okay, yeah, cardio was pretty damn unnecessary, given their current situation. But it gave Sam something to do, and it at least gave him the chance to explore, meet new people and make sure they were doing alright. Time was a strange thing inside the Soul Stone: unmeasurable without any days or nights or seasons, and unmoored from their bodies’ biological clocks, so they simultaneously had no time and too much of it. If Bucky wanted to spend his time on the Soul Stone equivalent of building miniatures or lego sets or whatever, well, it was far from the worst way to fill the time, even if it was incredibly nerdy.

“Thanks for the reminder of our ghostly status, you’re a real ray of sunshine, Barnes,” said Sam, and went over to join Bucky by his goat pen/mini-Middle Earth. It really was impressive, rich with detail and lush with color. “Hey, you should make the beacons too.”

“I knew I forgot something!” Bucky narrowed his eyes and bit his lip, concentrating intently. It was, Sam reflected, a ridiculously cute expression on him. After a few seconds, a series of tiny fires lit up, and Bucky beamed down at his creation. “Looks even better than those movies, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does,” said Sam honestly, and Bucky hummed in a sweet and pleased sort of way before he turned his smile in Sam’s direction. Sam really should have built up an immunity to that smile by now, given that it was no longer quite so rare as it had once been, but nope. It went straight to Sam’s heart every time. This time though, it did something new too. It made Sam realize: _I should kiss him_. It was a comfortable kind of realization, arriving in Sam’s mind with gentle inevitability, the logical destination of a journey that had started with that dance in the memory of Harlem. “What’re you gonna build next?”

“Dunno. Thought I’d come with you on your run before I started anything new,” Bucky said, and got to his feet.

“What happened to _there’s no point doing cardio_?”

“No point doing cardio, sure, but you’re not boring,” said Bucky, aiming another sweet smile down at Sam. He extended a hand down to Sam. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Sam took his hand, and used it to tug him close and kiss him. Bucky inhaled sharply, going stiff with surprise for a second, and Sam nearly pulled away, ready to pass the kiss off as a mistake, an _I tripped and my lips fell on your lips, my bad_ , but then Bucky’s lips went soft, and he opened to Sam without reservation. Bucky brought his hand up to Sam’s face, his fingertips just barely glancing against Sam’s skin, and the barely there sensation of it made Sam sigh into their kiss, turn his heated cheek further into the cool vibranium of Bucky’s palm while he held tightly to Bucky’s other hand while they kissed and kissed.

This was no tentative and careful first kiss. It was a kiss like breathing: that easy, and that necessary.

* * *

People, it turned out, could be as changeable as the landscape here inside the Soul Stone. Like a dream, you could be all different versions of yourself—younger, older, whatever—and more often than not, just like in a dream, you didn’t really have any conscious control over it. For Sam, the differences were rarely all that stark. Sometimes he’d look younger, something Sam only noticed when he happened to catch a glimpse of himself in a mirror to find past facial hair choices coming back to haunt him; on a few notable occasions, Sam had found himself back in his old pararescue uniform, like some part of him was always in the middle of the war.

For Bucky, who’d undergone so many changes and traumas over the years, every version of him was heartbreakingly distinct, and Sam got to see just about all of them in the Soul Stone: the Bucky Barnes who was just some kid from Brooklyn who’d never seen any fight worse than a back alley brawl, who smiled as bright and easy as sunshine and had a ready laugh; Sergeant Barnes of the 107th, too close to gaunt and too damn haunted; Sergeant Barnes the Howling Commando, still haunted but burning quietly with purpose. On blessedly fleeting occasions, he was even the Winter Soldier, which always gave Sam a hell of a scare until he got a look at Bucky’s face, which had none of the dead-eyed relentlessness from Sam’s run-ins with the Soldier. Instead, the hollow despair etched on Bucky’s face made Sam scared in a whole different kind of way. Other times, he was the Bucky Sam had met after the mess in Vienna, with wary and exhausted eyes, still struggling to find himself, to find safety. And sometimes he was the Bucky who’d begun to build himself back up from nothing in Wakanda, left arm gone, clear-eyed, healing.

No matter what Bucky looked like, Sam treated him the same. How could he not? He was always Bucky, all the different versions of him recognizable as the same man, and it wasn’t like Bucky’s memory faltered when he looked different. It just meant he was having a hard time, if he was looking like the Soldier, or it was proof that he was still working through what it meant to reconcile all those different versions of himself into who he was becoming now. Sam wasn’t about to hold it against him. He preferred just plain holding Bucky, no matter what he looked like, because it eased something in Sam to be able to hug all these different versions of Bucky, like he could offer some comfort to the Buckys who’d never gotten much comfort at all.

And anyway, most often, Bucky just looked like—well, like himself. A new and steady synthesis of all those other Buckys: sometimes with long hair, or sometimes with short, sometimes clean-shaven, sometimes not, but always with the new vibranium arm Shuri had given him, and smiling and laughing more with every day, or at least, what passed for days in the Soul Stone.

It frustrated Bucky though, when he turned changeable. Every time he caught a glimpse of some other version of himself—in his watery reflection in the lake, in a window, in a mirror—he’d get nervous or flustered, or even upset. This time, Bucky noticed his reflection in the car window looking distinctly Winter Soldier-ish what with the all-black uniform and messy long hair. He still had his vibranium arm though, so Sam wasn’t too worried about Bucky’s mood or mental state.

“Fuck, you shoulda said something, Sam,” Bucky said, closing his eyes and focusing until he was an acceptably non-Soldier version of himself again.

They were taking a brief break from their Soul Stone road trip to find everyone Strange insisted they’d need in the coming battle. The break wasn’t, strictly speaking, physically necessary— _you’re only indulging your physical needs out of habit,_ Strange was always telling them—but even if it wasn’t, Sam liked to keep up those pesky habits of having an actual body and being alive. So he insisted on bathroom and food and rest breaks, and Bucky obliged him.

“Why?” Sam asked as he stretched. “Doesn’t make a difference to me what you look like, Bucky. I know it’s still you.”

Sam moved on from stretching his arms and neck to doing squats and lunges. Bucky just paced, arms crossed tightly over his chest.

“Yeah, alright, but it doesn’t say great things about my mental stability. And it’s not—I don’t know how you can see all that, and still—”

Bucky turned away from Sam, and Sam stood from his squat. He came up behind Bucky and wrapped his arms around Bucky’s waist. Some of Bucky’s tension dropped away as he covered Sam’s hands with his own, but not all of it. Sam tipped his head down and kissed Bucky’s neck as he considered how to answer him.

“I like seeing all of you,” he said eventually. “I like knowing all those different versions of you, even a little. Lets me feel like I can be there for you, I guess. And it makes me proud of you too, that you got through all that, that it’s part of who you are now.”

“Some of those different versions of me hurt you,” Bucky said.

“Yeah, you did,” Sam said, because he wasn’t about to pretend he hadn’t been in genuine fear for his life every time he’d gone up against the Winter Soldier. “But I know that wasn’t you making a free choice. And I know the Winter Soldier is nowhere near all or the most important part of you, even if some days, you feel like he is.”

Bucky broke free of Sam’s hold on him and turned to face him, a painful mix of disbelief and hope in his searching gaze. He was looking for the truth in Sam’s words, maybe, and he must have found it, because he pulled Sam close for a kiss, long and deep, and that was all of Bucky too, because he kissed with a devastating mix of total focus and sweetness, and a patient kind of passion that didn’t burn out no matter how long they kissed for.

When they broke apart, Bucky rested his forehead against Sam’s. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“Nothing to thank me for,” Sam told him, and kissed him again. “But you’re welcome anyway.”

* * *

One day, Sam thought up a car, and Bucky navigated them to a road, and they drove and drove and drove across the functionally infinite expanse of the Soul Stone, and they kept driving until they found a mountain. There was a shortage of high places in the Soul Stone—or at least there was in their little slice of it—people spreading out rather than up for the most part, and Sam had started to find it strangely claustrophobic. Bucky, ever practical, just wanted a good vantage point to scope out some more of the Soul Stone.

So they drove up and up and up the mountain’s switchback road, until they reached the best view point and then they stopped. Whoever had thought this mountain into being must have been conscientious and safety-oriented, because even here, they’d put up guard rails where the mountainside dropped away into cliffs. Sam and Bucky ignored the rails, of course. At this point, they couldn’t really be any deader than disembodied and pseudo-dead in a pocket universe or whatever, so they might as well curl up together by the cliffside, legs dangling over the edge, looking out at the perpetual golden hour of the Soul Stone, and all the sprawling, mixed-up expanse of the life Thanos’ victims had built up out of nothing.

“What’re we gonna do when we get back to the real world?” asked Sam.

Dr. Strange kept saying it wouldn’t be long now, that they had to be ready. Well, Sam was ready for the fight, but he wasn’t so sure he was ready for everything else. Together he and Bucky had built something good and strong and beautiful here; they’d dreamed it up and made it real, piece by piece, and kiss by kiss, and Sam was starting to worry they’d only been building a sandcastle, and a wave was coming to wipe it out.

“Fight some more aliens and save the world apparently, if Strange is right. Probably stop Steve from doing anything too dumb and dangerous. You know, the usual.”

“Yeah, okay, but after that. Are we even gonna remember this?”

Bucky tightened his hold on Sam. “I’m sure as hell gonna try. ‘Cause I have to say, I’m pretty sick of the whole amnesia deal.”

“But if we don’t.”

Sam lifted his head from Bucky’s shoulder so he could see Bucky’s face.

“Then take it from me,” Bucky said, shifting his hold on Sam so he could kiss Sam, gentle and soft and maybe a little sad already, as if he already knew they’d forget all this. “Some part of us will still remember. Nothing’s ever really erased.”

Bucky of all people was in a position to know. But their uncertain, looming deadline was beginning to feel less like freedom and a return to life, and more like the end of something precious.

“I don’t want to lose you,” admitted Sam. “I don’t want to lose this.”

Bucky’s eyes were steady and solemn on Sam’s when he said, low and sure, “You won’t. I promise.”

It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a promise Bucky could keep, and both of them knew it. A promise was no shield against death, especially not the kind of death that came mid-battle. They’d lose each other eventually, one way or another, just like Sam had lost Riley. There was no one on Earth, or probably even beyond it, who could make this promise to Sam and keep it. Keeping this particular promise wasn’t the point: making it was, believing in it was.

Here and now, held by Bucky on the precipice of falling, Sam believed in Bucky’s promise, believed he’d never give up on keeping it.

 _Nothing’s ever really erased_ , Bucky had said. If the wave came and turned their sandcastle back to sand again, well…that was what waves did. Sam and Bucky could build it again, even if it took a while, even if it looked different. _That_ was the promise Sam believed in, that was the promise he and Bucky could keep.

* * *

“Oh, that did something, didn’t it,” Sam hears Wanda say as if from far away. “Are you okay? Sam, Bucky?”

Sam opens his eyes to see Wanda’s pale, worried face. There’s no more haze of red or amber, there are no more sparkling threads of Wanda’s power. There’s just Wanda and Sam and Bucky, and the soul-sense between Sam and Bucky is as open as it’s ever been, rippling and vibrating with shock.

“I’m okay,” Sam says, the words coming automatically. _Is_ he okay? He’s not actually sure. His head feels too full, his body strangely heavy.

“I’m fine,” says Bucky, in a vague and blank tone that suggests no, he isn’t really entirely fine but he’s not actively dying.

They’re still holding hands, Sam realizes, and Bucky’s grip is tight.

“Alright,” Wanda says slowly, frowning as she looks between him and Bucky. “Well, I think I know how to break the bond now, so—”

“No!” Sam and Bucky say at the same time. Sam takes a breath and continues, “Let’s, uh, put a pin in that for now. Whatever you just did, it helped me remember some of what went down in the Soul Stone.”

“Me too,” adds Bucky.

“Is that…good?” asks Wanda anxiously. “Did you want me to do it again? I’m not sure what I even did, to be honest, but—”

There’s a fine sheet of sweat on her forehead, and she’s still pale, so Sam tells her, “Hey, no, don’t worry about it. Forget about us, are _you_ okay?”

“I’ll go get you some water,” Bucky murmurs, and lets go of Sam’s hand to get up.

The sudden lack of contact knocks the wind out of Sam, and Bucky sways on his feet for a couple seconds, but they both steady soon enough, the bond between them finally beginning to calm down. They get Wanda settled with some water and snacks, thank her, and tell her they’ll let her know if they want to try again, then they leave.

In the elevator, Bucky announces, “I need some time to think,” and Sam says he does too, and they go their separate ways, Bucky to the rooftop garden and Sam to the gym.

Bucky makes no attempt to fully block the bond, and neither does Sam—Sam’s pretty sure they might actually pass out if they try—but Sam does need some distance from it, so he muddles his way towards enough focus to shove the soul-sense into the background, a feat he only accomplishes by hitting the treadmill and running fast enough that all he can feel is the burn of effort in his lungs and muscles. Only then can Sam really start to think, to process.

Now he knows, a little, about how he and Bucky had ended up together in the Soul Stone. It’s an incomplete picture, sure, scattered snapshots of a relationship. But it’s enough to know: they’d had something real. They could have it again.

 _I don’t want to lose you_ , Sam had told Bucky. He’d known it could happen, had known it _would_ happen, but he’d believed in Bucky’s promise, he’d held onto Bucky anyway. Here and now, Sam feels distant from that certainty, is missing the steps that had led him to it. Here and now, Sam can’t help but think of Riley, how unbearable losing him had been, how he doesn’t think he can do anything like it again.

But then, Sam’s not one to run when he can fly. Maybe he’s missing the steps, sure, maybe the path is shrouded in fog or rained out, but he can see where it leads. He can take a leap of faith and let his wings carry him there. He can leap, and hope Bucky will be there to catch him.

Sam stops the treadmill. He’s pushed himself enough that his heart is pounding practically hard enough to feel, sweat dripping down his face. He lets the bond come into focus again, and it’s taut and humming, vibrating with the force of Bucky’s anxiety. Sam towels himself off as best he can, too impatient for a shower, and follows that line up and up, to the roof where Bucky’s pacing.

“You’re not blocking the bond,” Bucky says, voice as tense as his shoulders.

“No. Don’t think I want to, anymore.”

Bucky shoots him an agonized glance that yanks at the bond between them. “Why?”

“Because I think what we could have, what we had in the Soul Stone already—I think that’s worth getting over myself and my shit.”

Bucky stops his pacing, levels a sharp stare at Sam.

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean, I shouldn’t have given you the, I don’t know, metaphysical equivalent of the silent treatment just because I was scared. But shit, Bucky, when I thought you were dead—it just brought me back to losing Riley, and all I could think was _I can’t do this again_.”

“And now?”

“Did you see—I don’t know if you got the same memories I did, but—you made me a promise.” Bucky nods, one tight and tense motion of his head, so Sam continues. “And I know it’s a promise that we can’t keep, not really. I’m gonna lose you, one way or another, eventually, or you’ll lose me. Even you’re gonna run out of lives eventually, you know? But I realized—I believed you, when you made me that promise. I want to believe you again, I want to—I want to try to make this work.”

Bucky’s eyes are big with something too hurt to be hope, and he’s clenching his jaw so hard it’s got to hurt.

“This bond, or this—this relationship? Because they’re two really different things, Sam.”

None of Bucky’s anxiety has eased, the bond between them still humming fast and hard with distress as Bucky crosses his arms tightly.

“Both, I guess.”

Bucky laughs, sharp and incredulous. “ _Why_? Why do you want a—a permanent fucking link to the mess inside of me? You’re signing up to be in the radius of a goddamn bomb blast, Sam.”

“What?” Sam asks blankly. “Bucky, what the hell are you talking about—”

“ _Me_ , I’m talking about me. I’m not—I’m better, okay, I know, but I’m not— _I’m_ the bomb and the blast radius, Sam. I don’t want you getting caught in it again and again, and that’s all this is gonna be.”

“I know you won’t hurt me, c’mon, Bucky—”

Sam reaches for Bucky only for Bucky to jerk away from his hand before he can even touch him.

“I already have! Every time you get caught in one of my nightmares, every time you have to deal with my trauma shit—”

“Hey, it was my nightmare we got caught in the last time, you’re not the only one with trauma,” Sam says sharply.

“It got worse, when I was there. Because you knew how that nightmare would end, for me. We were gonna hit the fucking ground, because that’s what happened to me, and you’d have felt it too—”

“But we didn’t hit the ground. I’ve got wings, remember?”

Bucky just shakes his head.

“What about the next time? What about when it’s—when it’s me remembering being on the table, having what’s left of my arm cut off? What about when it’s me remembering freezing in that fucking cryotube? I can deal with this when it’s just me, Sam. It’s mine to carry, it’s mine to remember. But I can’t stand it when it hurts other people. I’m so sick of hurting people, and I don’t want to hurt you.”

Maybe it’s thanks to the bond, or maybe it’s just Sam finally paying the right kind of attention, but whatever it is, Sam thinks he understands just why Bucky’s so upset, why he’s always been so careful with the bond, with Sam. Every free choice Bucky’s made since escaping HYDRA has been about harm mitigation, about keeping other people safe from him: staying off the radar for two years, running after the whole mess Zemo kicked off, going after the other Winter Soldiers, going into cryo, getting rid of the trigger words…all of it has been Bucky desperately trying to keep other people safe, no matter how much it hurts him. Sam’s been a monumental idiot to miss that Bucky’s been doing the same for him. Which has, of course, caught them in something of a vicious feedback loop, given that the bond between them goes both ways, and right now Bucky’s pain is a jagged thing tearing along it.

And fuck, but it hurts Sam too, to know just how hard Bucky’s always trying to be safe, to keep others safe. Sam doesn’t want him to always be carrying that burden alone.

“For god’s sake, Bucky, you’re not hurting me just by existing, by being a person who’s healing, who feels things!”

“I can goddamn feel it, Sam, I’m hurting you right now!”

“That’s not you _hurting_ me, that’s me hurting _with_ you, because I care about you. Weird soul bond or not, I’d be feeling like this. If we were just friends and nothing more, I’d be feeling like this. And that’s okay.”

He takes a step towards Bucky, but Bucky’s still not having it, moving away to keep Sam at arm’s length. Sam hadn’t realized just how little Bucky’s usual personal space bubble has applied to Sam. Now that it does, it feels like a goddamn force field.

“Yeah, alright, but it’d hurt you a hell of a lot less if you weren’t magically hooked up to my actual soul,” says Bucky.

“Getting rid of this bond will hurt me. It’ll hurt both of us,” tries Sam.

Bucky sets his jaw at its most stubborn angle. “Once, for a little while, and then you’d get over it.”

“Yeah, no, I don’t think so! Got a taste of what it’d be like to lose it just the other week, and it sucked, Bucky! I wouldn’t ‘ _get over it_.’ And yeah, that scared the hell out of me, that’s why I was being such an asshole and blocking the bond, but I think what we had—what we could have again—is worth it. Don’t you?”

For all that Bucky’s feelings have been coming across the bond in full, vivid volume, he’s still been holding himself apart, and now, Sam decides he’s had enough of that. He closes both the physical and the metaphysical space between them, and takes Bucky in his arms, dives right into the unquiet, stormy clouds that have turned that usually deep and lovely mountain lake that represents Bucky’s soul into a roiling maelstrom.

Bucky’s arms come up around Sam and he holds on, trembling. The maelstrom starts to calm, sunlight breaking through.

“You can’t tell me you’re still seeing some pretty lake in the mountains inside me right now,” says Bucky, his voice thick with tears. “It’s a goddamn mess in here, Sam. Dunno why you’d wanna chain yourself to it.”

“A pretty lake in the mountains is exactly what I’m seeing, you’ve just got some rough weather going on right now. And this is no chain,” Sam says, pushing what reassurance he can along the bond. “Bucky, c’mon. I’ve already seen you, all of you, inside the Soul Stone. I know you, now, and I can’t unknow that. We can get rid of this weird soul bond shit, but I’ll still _know_ you. And you’ll still know me. That’s its own kind of bond.”

And, Sam knew, that bond would last even if they lost each other. Because Sam’s love for Riley still burned strong, even if Riley wasn’t here anymore.

“Yeah.”

“So unless you really hate however my soul feels to you, unless this bond is really hurting you too much to keep, then I want to keep it. Because I still mean what I said in the Soul Stone. I don’t want to lose this.”

Bucky’s grip around him tightens, and a small, pained noise escapes him that makes Sam unable to resist pressing a kiss to the side of his head.

“I don’t hate how your soul feels, are you kidding me?”

“What does it feel like anyway? You never said.” And Sam has, maybe, been a little too nervous to ask.

Bucky takes a deep breath, most of the jagged tension along the bond finally going calm. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Hey, I painted you a word picture of _your_ soul,” Sam protests, and Bucky laughs. It’s a tiny laugh, barely a puff of breath against Sam’s neck, but it’s still enough to make Sam smile wide.

“Alright. Bear with me, I guess,” he says and takes a deep breath before he continues, “Uh, a lot of the time I was out of cryo, I wasn’t allowed outside. Tried to escape too many times for that. I was in bases, underground usually, or on missions, and I was just going from transport to the target. There wasn’t really much time to spend outside, unless I was waiting to take a shot. So it’d be a long time, before I saw the sky again, before I could really look at it, you know? When I could, I’d look up and realize how much I’d missed it, even though I couldn’t—couldn’t really remember why. That’s what you feel like, to me. Seeing the sky for the first time in a long time. That’s—that’s what it’s like, every time.”

Sam hasn’t even got the words to deal with that. He just has this rush of love that’s not any kind of memory. It’s him, now, in this moment, and it’s Bucky too, both of them turning the bond into something that’s bigger than either of them.

After one shuddering breath, Bucky lifts his head from Sam’s neck, and pulls away from Sam’s tight hold on him to look at his face. He brings his hands up to cup Sam’s cheeks, and his touch is tender, wondering, and absolutely steady. He kisses Sam, just once, feather light so it’s like one moment of sharing the air between them.

“You made me a promise, Bucky Barnes,” Sam says shakily. “You planning to keep it?”

Bucky rests his forehead against Sam’s, eyes creasing up in his truest smile. “Yeah,” he says, light as breath. “Yeah, I am.”

And he seals the promise with a kiss as sweet and deep and calm as that glacier blue lake that Sam loves so well, and Sam kisses back, until it’s like both of their souls are soaring.


End file.
